the world according to clarkson

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CLARKSON

Jeremy Clarkson made his name presenting a poky motoringprogramme on BBC2 called Top Gear. He left to forge a career inother directions but made a complete hash of everything and endedup back on Top Gear again. He lives with his wife, Francie, andthree children in Oxfordshire. Despite this, he has a clean drivinglicence.

The World According toClarksonJEREMY CLARKSON

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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These articles first appeared in the Sunday Times between 2001and 2003This collection first published by Michael Joseph 2004Published in Penguin Books 20051

Copyright © Jeremy Clarkson, 2004All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subjectto the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, belent,re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’sprior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition including thiscondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90135–0

To Francie

ContentsAnother Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me a Break

All This Health and Safety Talk is Just Killing Me

Men are a Lost Cause, and We’re Proud of It

We Let Them Get Away with Murder on Radio

Willkommen and Achtung, This is Austrian Hospitality

Gee Whiz Guys, But the White House is Small

Flying Round the World, No Seat is First Class

They’re Trying to Lower the Pulse of Real Life

Forget the Euro, Just Give Us a Single Socket

I’d Have Laid Down My Life for Wotsisname

Creeping Suburbia isn’t Quite What I Expected

Is It a Plane? No, It’s a Flying Vegetable

Is This a Winner’s Dinner or a Dog’s Breakfast?

Call This a Riot? It was a Complete Washout

Being a Millionaire is Just One Step from being Skint

What Does It Take to Get a Decent Meal Round Here?

Cutting Lawns is the Last Word in Civilisation

An Invitation from My Wife I Wish I Could Refuse

How Big a Mistake are You Going to Make?

America, Twinned with the Fatherland

Cornered by a German Mob Bent on Revenge

Wising Up to the EU After My Tussles in Brussels

A Weekend in Paris, the City of Daylight Robbery

It’s a Work of Art, and It was Built on Our Backs

They Speak the Language of Death in Basque Country

Reason Takes a Bath in the Swimming Pool

You Can Fly an Awfully Long Way on Patience

What I Missed on My Hols: Everyday Madness

Rule the Waves? These Days We’re Lost at Sea

Why Can’t We Do Big or Beautiful Any More?

Learn from Your Kids and Chill Out Ibiza-Style

Going to the Dentist in the Teeth of All Reason

Sea Duel with the Fastest Migrants in the West

My Verdict? Juries are As Guilty As Hell…

The More We’re Told the Less We Know

Without a PR Protector, I’m Just Another Fat Git

Why Have an Argument? Let’s Say It with Fists

Speaking As a Father, I’ll Never be a Mother

I’m Just Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation, Britney

Chin Up, My Little Angel - Winning is for Losers

A Murderous Fox Has Made Me Shoot David Beckham

I Bring You News from the Edge of the Universe

Go to the Big Top: It’s Better than Big Brother

The Nit-picking Twitchers Out to Ground Britain

Cricket’s the National Sport of Time Wasters

Have I Got News… I’m Another Failed Deayton

Home Alone Can be the Perfect State for a Child

Ivan the Terrible is One Hell of a Holidaymaker

In Terror Terms, Rambo Has a Lot to Answer For

House-Price Slump? It’s the School Run, Stupid

The Lottery will Subsidise Everything, Except Fun

The Shuttle’s Useless, But Book Me on the Next Flight

When the Chips are Down, I’m with the Fatherland

Save the Turtles: Put Adverts on Their Shells

Give Me a Moment to Sell You Staffordshire

A Quick Snoop Behind the Queen’s Net Curtains

Who Needs Abroad When You Can Holiday in Hythe?

We Have the Galleries, But Where’s the Art?

You Think SARS is Bad? There’s Worse Out There

Mandela Just Doesn’t Deserve His Pedestal

In Search of Lost Time, One Chin and a Life

In Search of a Real Garden at the Chelsea Show

To Boldly Go Where Nobody’s Tried a Dumb Record Before

Beckham’s Tried, Now It’s My Turn to Tame the Fans

The Unhappiest People on Earth? You’d Never Guess

Welcome to Oafsville: It’s Any Town Near You

If Only My Garden Grew As Well As the Hair in My Ears

Men, You Have Nothing to FEAR But Acronyms

Red Sky at Night, Michael Fish’s Satellite is On Fire

I Wish I’d Chosen Marijuana and Biscuits Over Real Life

I’ve been to Paradise… It was an Absolute Pain

Eureka, I’ve Discovered a Cure for Science

Why the Booker Shortlist Always Loses the Plot

Look in the Souvenir Shop and Weep for England

Eton - It’s Worse than an Inner-City Comprehensive

A Giant Leap Back for Mankind

What a Wonderful Flight into National Failure

The Peace Game in Iraq is Jeux sans Frontieères

The Juries are Scarier than the Criminals

They’re Trying to Frame Kristen Scott Donkey

All I Want for Christmas is a Ban on Office Parties

Another Day’s Holiday? Please, Give Me aBreakAccording to a poll, the vast majority of people questioned as theystruggled back to work last week thought that England should havefollowed Scotland’s lead and made Tuesday a bank holiday.

Two things strike me as odd here. First, that anyone could bebothered to undertake such research and, second, that anyone intheir right mind could think that the Christmas break was in someway too short.

I took ten days off and by 11 o’clock on the first morning I had drunkfourteen cups of coffee, read all the newspapers and the Guardianand then… and then what?

By lunchtime I was so bored that I decided to hang a few pictures.So I found a hammer, and later a man came to replaster the bits ofwall I had demolished. Then I tried to fix the electric gates, whichwork only when there’s an omega in the month. So I went down thedrive with a spanner, and later another man came to put them backtogether again.

I was just about to start on the Aga, which had broken down onChristmas Eve, as they do, when my wife took me on one side bymy earlobe and explained that builders do not, on the whole, spendtheir spare time writing, so writers should not build on their days off.It’s expensive and it can be dangerous, she said.

She’s right. We have these lights in the dining room which aresupposed to project stars onto the table below. It has never reallybothered me that the light seeps out of the sides so the stars areinvisible; but when you are bored, this is exactly the sort of thingthat gets on your nerves.

that gets on your nerves.

So I bought some gaffer tape and suddenly my life had a purpose.There was something to do.

Mercifully, Christmas intervened before I could do any moredamage, but then it went away again and once more I found myselfstaring at the day through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.Each morning, bed and the blessed relief of unconsciousnessseemed so far away.

I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge,hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of coldsausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obviousreason, I decided to buy a footstool.

I took the entire family to the sort of gifty-wifty shop where the smellof pot-pourri is so pungent that it makes you go cross-eyed. Eventhough the children were lying on the floor gagging, I still spenthours deliberately choosing a footstool that was too small and thewrong colour so that I could waste some more time taking it back.

The next day, still gently redolent of Delia Smith’s knicker drawer, Idecided to buy the wrong sort of antique filing cabinet. But after thefootstool debacle my wife said no. So it seemed appropriate that Ishould develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when youare at a loose end because everything, up to and including herpes,is better than being bored.

It’s hard, I know, to summon up a bout of genital sores at will, butwith a little effort you can catch a cold which, if you whimperenough, will easily pass for flu. And yup, even lying in bed watchingJudy Finnegan in a Santa suit beats the terminal cancer that isboredom.

Boredom forces you to ring people you haven’t seen for eighteenyears and halfway through the conversation you remember why youleft it so long. Boredom means you start to read not only mail-ordercatalogues but also the advertising inserts that fall on the floor.Boredom gives you half a mind to get a gun and go berserk in thelocal shopping centre, and you know where this is going. Eventually,boredom means you will take up golf.

On the day before Christmas Eve I sat next to a chap on the trainwho, as we pulled out of Paddington, called his wife to say that hewas finished, that he had retired and that from now on his life wasentirely his own. He was trying to sound happy about it, but therewas a faraway, baleful look in his eyes which said it all.

He would spend a month or two at home, breaking interior fixturesand fittings and generally killing everything in the garden, and thenone day he would accept an invitation to tee off and that would be it.His life would be over long before he actually stopped breathing.Pity. He seemed like a nice chap.

Or what about fishing? You see those people sitting on the side ofthe canal in the drizzle and you wonder: how bored do you have tobe at home for that to be better?

The answer, I suspect, is ‘not very’. After a week I was at screamingpitch and I couldn’t even cook some sausages to put in the fridgebecause one afternoon, when my wife wasn’t looking, I had tried tomend the Aga. And the thing had come off.

I could have put it back, of course, but strangely, when you’re notbusy, there is never enough time to do anything. I wrote a letter andstill have not found enough space in the day to put it in anenvelope. Mind you, this might have something to do with the factthat I spent eight hours last Tuesday on the lavatory. Well, it’s as

good a hobby as any.

Apparently the British work longer hours than anyone else inEurope and stern-faced men are always telling us that this causesstress and heart disease. Fair point; but not working, I assure you,would give us all piles.

Sunday 7 January 2001

All This Health and Safety Talk is JustKilling MeYou may recall that after the Hatfield train crash last year six-chinsPrescott, our deputy prime minister, turned up at the scene andgave the distinct impression that with a bit more effort and a lotmore investment, nobody would die on the railways ever again.

There was a similar response last week to the news that the numberof people caught drinking and driving in the run-up to Christmasrose by 0.1 per cent. All sorts of sandalistas have been on the radioto explain that if the drink-drive limit were lowered to minus eightand the police were empowered to shoot motorists on sight, thendeath on the road would become a thing of the past.

These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook ourchildren’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosisand that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and itdoesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have tosuffer from a spot of light bruising.

Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would bespilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to bestopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said theman from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’

‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.’

Like every big organisation these days, the BBC is obsessed withthe wellbeing of those who set foot on its premises. Studios mustdisplay warning notices if there is real glass on the set, and theother day I was presented with a booklet explaining how to use adoor. I am not kidding.

So you can imagine the problems I shall encounter this week when,for a television series I’m making, I shall climb into a decompressionchamber to find out what life would be like on an airliner at 30,000feet if one of the windows were to break.

The poor producer has been given a form the size of Luxembourgwhich asks what hazards I will face. Well, my lungs will explode andthe air in the cavities under my fillings will expand ninefold, causinguntold agony, but I probably won’t feel this because there is a goodchance that the subsequent hypoxia will turn me into a dribblingvegetable.

I consider it a risk worth taking, but my thoughts are irrelevantbecause these days my life and how I live it are in the hands of themen from health and safety. The same people who said last year Icould not fly in a US-Army helicopter because the pilot was notBBC-approved.

Oh, come on. Everyone knows that American forces are not allowedto crash their helicopters. Following the 1993 debacle in Somalia,when they lost sixteen men who were sent in to rescue two alreadydead comrades, it has now been decided that no US serviceman willever be hurt again. Not even in a war.

This has now spread to Britain. You’ve read, I’m sure, about thehearing damage which can be caused by sergeant-majors whoshout at privates, but the plague goes deeper than that. On a visitto RAF Henlow last week, I was rather surprised to see thatsomeone from health and safety had pinned a poster to the noticeboard, warning the fighter pilots that alcohol will make themaggressive and violent. Oh no, that’s the last thing we want –aggressive and violent fighter pilots.

Then we have Britain’s fleet of nuclear-powered hunter killer

submarines, which have all been grounded or whatever it is you dowith boats, by health and safety because they could be dangerous.

Now attention has been focused on Britain’s stockpile of uranium-depleted missiles, which are by far and away the best method ofpenetrating the armour on enemy tanks. Great, except health andsafety doesn’t like them because it turns out they might killsomeone.

Former squaddies are on the news saying that they loosed off a fewrounds in Kosovo and now they have caught cancer. Deepestsympathies, but let’s look at some facts. They only way depleteduranium can get through the skin is if someone shoots you with abullet made out of it. It can get into the body through the lungs, butsince it is 40 per cent less radioactive than uranium that occursnaturally in the ground, it does seem unlikely that it could cause anydamage. I have been down a uranium mine in Western Australiaand, so far, I have not grown another head.

However, I do find it odd that the Ministry of Defence will test onlysoldiers who served in Kosovo and not those who were in the Gulf,where 300 tons of depleted uranium were used and the alpharadiation has had longer to do its stuff. But if by some miracle itdoes find that our boys have been irradiated and that one squaddiedied as a result, then we can be assured that depleted uranium will,in future, be used only on NATO, rather than by NATO.

Where will this end? The US Air Force managed to kill seven Britishsoldiers in the Gulf with what it likes to call friendly fire, so would itnot be sensible for those of a health and safety persuasion to banAmericans from the battlefield, too?

Some people say global warming and ozone depletion will kill us.But I’m far more worried about the people who have made it their

sworn duty to keep us all alive.


Men are a Lost Cause, and We’re Proud ofItBeing a man, I am unwilling to pull over and ask someone fordirections, because this would imply they are somehow clevererthan me. And obviously they’re not, because I’m toasty warm in acar and they’re mooching around on foot.

Sometimes, though, and usually in a town where the council has leta group of fourteen-year-olds from one of its special schools designa one-way system, I have been known to give up, become a traitorto my gender and ask a passer-by for advice.

What a complete waste of time. If they begin by saying ‘er’, thenthey don’t know and you are going to waste hours while theywonder whether you go left at Sketchley’s or right. So here’s a tip. Ifsomeone hesitates when you ask the way, or even if a look ofbewilderment befalls their countenance for the briefest moment,drive off.

Of course, some launch immediately into a bunch of militaristicdirections, involving clear, concise hand signals and bushy-toppedtrees at nine o’clock.

But that’s of no help either because you won’t be listening. It is aknown medical fact, and it has been so since the dawn of time, thata man will hear the first word and then shut down.

When the Romans invaded England, they went home to celebrateand didn’t come back for 80 years. Why? Because they couldn’t findit and, if they did ask for directions in France, they didn’t listen.

In the late thirteenth century, Edward Longshanks used women tosteer his armies around the realm because they could listen to, and

steer his armies around the realm because they could listen to, andabsorb, directions, whereas men couldn’t. Actually, I just made thatup. But there must be a vestige of truth in it because if he had reliedfor guidance on his knights, he’d have ended up in Falmouth ratherthan Falkirk.

Certainly, I didn’t listen last week when, having been unable to findthe shop I wanted, I found myself drawn inexorably by the manmagnet that is Tottenham Court Road into one of those temples tothe pagan world of meaningless beeps and unusual hieroglyphics:Computers ‘R’ Us.

I didn’t listen to the voices in my head telling me to get out and nordid I listen when the man started to explain all about a new type ofSony laptop that has too many vowels in its name to bepronounceable. It begins with a V and then you have to make thesort of noise a cat would emit if you fed it through a mangle.

Now don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a column about how I don’tunderstand computers, and how I wish I were back on theRotherham Advertiser feeding bits of bog roll into a sit-up-and-begRemington.

I like computers very much and I know enough about them to sendemails, write stories and find some ladyboys in Thailand.Unfortunately, however, I do not know as much about them as thepeople who work or hang around in computer shops, which meansmy mind does that man thing and stops working.

Like, for instance, if you were offered the choice of Windows 2000or Windows 98, you’d go for the bigger number. But the man in theshop advised me to spend less on the 98 and, when asked why,proceeded for all I know to talk about his Newfoundland terrier. I didnot hear a single thing he said.

The one thing I wanted was an ability to send emails via a cellularphone, so I asked: ‘Can I plug this into my mobile?’ And he replied…but frankly, he may as well have been talking about the problems ofmaking decent onion gravy while marooned in a Nepalese hill fort.

So I ended up buying it… and now I think it’s broken. Every time Ilog off from the internet the machine shuts down, casting whateverI’ve written that day into a silicon no man’s land.

Obviously, I could take the computer back to the shop, but thenthey’ll find that I’ve been looking at ladyboys and this will beembarrassing. Besides, I can’t remember where the shop was, andI’m damned if I’m going to ask.

I could phone a friend, but it would be a waste of a call because, asa man, I’m just an ego covered in skin and, if he knows how to solvemy problem, that’s going to cause some light bruising. So I won’tlisten. And if he doesn’t know, then he’s of no help anyway.

At this point, a woman would reach for the instruction book, but thisis the single biggest difference between the sexes. Forget the needto be cuddled after sex. And forget spatial awareness and fuzzylogic, because the most butch woman in the world, even MrsThatcher, would lie on her stomach for hours with the manual for anew video recorder, ensuring that when she gets back from dinnerthat night she will have taped the right channel at the right time.

How dull is that. Me? I stab away at various buttons safe in theknowledge that I could be taping something on the other side, nextTuesday, which might be much better.

This certainly helps when playing board games. Because I’ve neverread the rules for Monopoly, I travel around the board in whicheverdirection seems to be most appropriate, and if anyone says I have

to go clockwise, I respond with a strange faraway look.

It always works. I always win.


We Let Them Get Away with Murder onRadioIt’s coming to something when the news is making the news, but thatis exactly what happened at the beginning of last week when thepapers were full of ITN’s victory over the BBC in the Battle of theTen ’clock Bongs.

The BBC explained afterwards that it had twice as many stories,twice as many live reports and twice as much foreign coverage, butit was stymied by ITV, which ran Millionaire two minutes late andwent straight to its bulletin without a commercial break.

It even had the gallant knight Sir Trevor McDonald crop up in themiddle of Chris Tarrant to say there would be some news soon andnot to go away.

This ratings war is getting dirty and deeply annoying. In the past,when programmes largely began on the hour or at half past, youcould watch a show on ITV and then, when it had finished, findsomething else that was just starting on another channel.

But look at the schedules now. Things start at five past and finish attwelve minutes to, so by the time you flick over to the Beeb’s newdrama series you’ve missed the explosion and the subsequent carchase and have no idea what’s going on.

I understand why it has to happen, of course. When I worked onTop Gear it didn’t matter whether we were featuring a new Ferrarithat ran on water or standing around in a field pretending to besheep, we always got the same viewing figures. However, if theprogramme began late, after all the other channels had started their8.30 p.m. shows, we would drop 1 million or so.

Interestingly, however, this type of ‘schedule shuffling’ does notseem to be happening in the world of radio.

My wife, for instance, listens only to Radio 4. It could run a two-hourshipping forecast and still she would not retune to another station. Iknow for a fact that, like the rest of the country, she has no cluewhat Melvyn Bragg is talking about on In Our Time, but everyThursday morning the whole house echoes to the unfathomablepontifications of his stupefyingly dull guests.

At 10.25 a.m. every day I point out that over on Radio 2 Ken Brucehas a good quiz about pop music – a subject she enjoys very much– but for some extraordinary reason she prefers to listen to thestate of the sea at Dogger Bank.

I am no better. Left to my own devices I start the day with TerryWogan, who last week got it into his head that all Chinese peoplesmell of Brussels sprouts. Then it’s Ken’s pop quiz followed byJimmy Old.

Now at this point I should turn over, because Old bombards hislisteners with the big-band sound and talks to his guests about theprice of fish. Then people call up and read out the editorial from theDaily Telegraph and it’s just not me. But no. I sit there saying thatit’s only for two hours and then it’ll be time for Steve Wright.

Why do I do this? On television I only need to catch the tiniestglimpse of a spangly jacket, the suggestion of a Birmingham accentor the first bar of the EastEnders theme tune, and in one fluidmovement I reach for the remote and switch over. Yet, displayingthe sort of brand loyalty that would cause Marks & Spencer to pickleme in brine, I will drive for hour after hour while Old drones on abouthow Mrs Nazi of Esher thinks asylum seekers should all be shot.

There is a choice. Obviously Radio 1 is out, unless you enjoy beingserenaded by people banging bits of furniture together, and Radio3 transmits nothing but the sound of small animals being tortured.What about local radio? In London there is Magic FM whichbroadcasts the Carpenters all day long. Of course, the Carpentersare fine – especially when you have a headache – but between thetunes men come on and speak.

I should have thought that being a disc jockey wasn’t so bad. Imean, it could be worse. But obviously I’m wrong, because nowherein the whole of humanity will you find a bunch of people quite sounhappy as the CD spinners on ‘Misery’ FM.

By 8 a.m. on a Monday they are already counting down the hours toFriday night as though all of us treat the working week as somethingthat has to be endured. In their world, we all work for Cruella De Vil.And it’s always raining.

Even if it’s a bright sunny day and we’ve just heard on the news thatJohn Prescott has burst, they would still find something to moanabout and then it’s on to Yesterday Once More for the fourteenthtime since 6 a.m.

There is no point in going elsewhere because quite the reverseapplies. Misery FM is largely run by people on their way down thecareer ladder, but elsewhere in local radio most of the DJs believethemselves to be on the way up – so they sound as if they’re talkingto you while someone is pushing Harpic up their nostrils with anelectric toothbrush.

‘Who knows?’ they must be thinking. ‘A television producer might belistening, so if I’m really zany and wacky all the time I’ll end up on thebox.’

Too right, matey, but on television they’ll see you coming and switchchannels.

On the radio, for some extraordinary reason, they won’t.


Willkommen and Achtung, This is AustrianHospitalityA small tip. The border between Switzerland and Austria may bemarked with nothing more than a small speed hump, and thecustoms hut may appear to be deserted, but whatever you do, stop.If you don’t, your rear-view mirror will fill with armed men in uniformand the stillness of the night will be shattered with searchlights andklaxons.

I’m able to pass on this handy hint because last week, while drivingin convoy with my camera crew from St Moritz to Innsbruck, a mansuddenly leapt out of his darkened hut and shouted: ‘Achtung.’

I have no idea what ‘achtung’ means, except that it usually precedesa bout of gunfire followed by many years of digging tunnels. Itherefore pulled over and stopped, unlike the crew, who didn’t.

The man, white with rage and venom and fury, demanded mypassport and refused to give it back until I had furnished him withdetails of the people in the other car which had dared to sail pasthis guard tower.

I’d often wondered how I’d get on in this sort of situation. Would Iallow myself to be tortured to save my colleagues? How strong is mywill, my playground-learnt bond? How long would I hold out?

About three seconds, I’m ashamed to say. Even though I have twospare passports, I blabbed like a baby, handing over the crew’snames, addresses and mobile phone number.

So they came back, and the driver was manhandled from the carand frogmarched up to the stop sign he’d ignored. His passport wasconfiscated and then it was noticed that all his camera equipment

confiscated and then it was noticed that all his camera equipmenthad not been checked out of Switzerland. We were in trouble.

So we raised our hands, and do you know what? The guard didn’teven bat an eyelid. The sight of four English people standing at aborder post in the middle of Europe, in the year 2001, with theirarms in the air didn’t strike him as even remotely odd.

We have become used to a gradual erosion of interference withinternational travel. You only know when you’ve gone from Franceinto Belgium, for instance, because the road suddenly goes allbumpy. French customs are normally on strike and their oppositenumbers in Belgium are usually hidden behind a mountain of chipswith a mayonnaise topping.

But in Austria things are very different. Here you will not find a fattyworking out his pension. Our man on the road from St MoritztoInnsbruck was a lean, frontline storm trooper in full camouflagefatigues and he seemed to draw no distinction between theEnglander and the Turk or Slav. Nobody, it seems, is welcome in theAustro-Hungarian empire.

The camera crew, who were very disappointed at the way I’dgrassed them up and kept referring to me as ‘Von Strimmer’ orsimply ‘The Invertebrate’, were ordered back to Switzerland. Andme? For selling them out, I was allowed to proceed to Innsbruck.

Which does invite a question. How did the guard know where I wasgoing? We had never mentioned our destination and yet he knew. Itgets stranger, because minutes later I was pulled over for speedingand even though I had a Zurich-registered car, the policemanaddressed me straight away in English.

This puzzled me as I drove on and into the longest tunnel in theworld. That was puzzling, too, as it wasn’t marked on the map.

world. That was puzzling, too, as it wasn’t marked on the map.What’s happening on the surface that they don’t want us to see?

Finally I arrived at the hotel into which I’d been booked, but amysterious woman in a full-length evening gown explainedmenacingly that she had let my room to someone else. And that allthe other hotels in Innsbruck were fully booked.

Paranoia set in and took on a chilling air when I learnt that one ofthe army bobsleigh people I was due to meet the following day hadbeen kicked to death outside a nightclub.

I ended up miles away at a hotel run by a man we shall call ‘TheDownloader’. ‘So, you are an Englisher,’ he said, when I checked in.‘There are many good people in England,’ he added, with the sortof smile that made me think he might be talking about HaroldShipman.

Something is going on in Austria. They’ve told the world that theFreedom Party leader has stepped down, but how do we know he’sgone and won’t be back? Let’s not forget these people are pastmasters at subterfuge.

I mean, they managed to convince the entire planet that Adolf Hitlerwas a German. Most people here do think Haider will be back. Aschancellor. And that’s a worry.

I’m writing this now in my room, hoping to send it via email to theSunday Times but each time I try to log on, messages come back tosay it’s impossible. Maybe that’s because The Downloader is up inhis attic, looking at unsavoury images of bondage and knives, ormaybe it’s because I’m being watched. Journalists are.

Either way, I’m nervous about smuggling text like this past customstomorrow when I’m due to fly home. I shall try to rig up some kind ofdevice using my mobile phone, hoping these words reach you. If

device using my mobile phone, hoping these words reach you. Ifthey do, yet I mysteriously disappear, for God’s sake send help. I’mat the…

Sunday 11 February 2001

Gee Whiz Guys, But the White House isSmallIf you are the sort of person who gets off on Greek marbles andbroken medieval cereal bowls, then there’s not much point in visitingan American museum. Think: while Europe was hosting thecrusades, the Americans were hunting bison.

However, I have always wanted to see the Bell X-1, the first plane totravel faster than the speed of sound, so last weekend I set out forthe Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The trip was not acomplete success because the X-1 was swathed in bubble wrap andhoused in a part of the museum that was closed for renovation. Butnever mind, I found something else.

There are those who think America is as richly diverse as Europe –they’re hopelessly wrong, and Washington, DC is the worst of it. I’dnever realised that it is n’t actually in a state. The founding fathersfelt that, if it were, the others would feel left out – and that’s verynoble. Except it means that residents of the capital city of the freeworld have no vote.

Another feature it shares with Havana and Beijing is the immensesense of civic pomposity. The downtown area is full of vast, facelessbuildings set in enormous open spaces and guarded by impossiblyblond secret-service agents in massive Chevy Suburbans. Thepavements are marble and the policemen gleam.

Just three blocks south of Capitol Hill you find yourself in an areawhere 70 per cent of the population are gunmen and the other 30per cent have been shot. Then to the west you have the dotcomzone, which is full of idiotic companies with stupid names andunintelligible mission statements. Half.formed.thought.corp: Bringing

the World Closer Together.

You look at those huge mirrored office blocks and you think: ‘Whatare you all doing in there?’ The politicians will never have theanswer as they all live in an area called Georgetown, which is asantiseptic and isolated from the real world as the sub-basement at acentre for research into tropical diseases.

Here, the only cannon is Pachelbel’s. It was nice to find it playing inthe lobby of my hotel. It made me feel safe and cosseted, but it wason in the lift and in the bookstore next door, and in the art gallery.

It was even playing in the ‘authentic’ Vietnamese restaurant wherecustomers can gorge themselves on caramelised pork in a whitewine jus. Now look, I’ve been to Saigon and in one notablerestaurant I was offered ‘carp soaked in fat’ and ‘chicken torn intopieces’. A difficult choice, so I went for the ‘rather burnt rice landslug’. I have no idea what it was, but it sure as hell wasn’tcaramelised or served in a wine sauce.

Still, what do the Americans know about Vietnam? Well, more thanthey know about France, that’s for sure. The next morning I orderedan ‘authentic French-style country breakfast’ which consisted ofeggs sunny-side up, sausage links, bacon, hash browns and – hereit comes – a croissant. Oh, that’s all right then.

What’s not all right are the people who were eating there. Everysingle one of them was a politician, or a politician’s lapdog, or apolitical commentator or a political lobbyist.

Because all these people with a common interest live together in alittle cocoon, they labour under the misapprehension that their workis in some way important. They begin to believe that there are onlytwo types of people: not black or white, not rich or poor, not

American or better; just Democrat or Republican.

So what, you may be wondering, is wrong with that? Surely it’s agood idea to put all the politicians together in one place, it savesthe rest of us from having to look at them.

I’m not so sure. When Peter Mandelson couldn’t remember whetherhe’d made a phone call or not he had to resign and it was treatedas the most important event in world history. On the television newsa man with widescreen ears explained that Tony Blair might actuallydelay the election, as though everyone, in every pub in the land,was talking of nothing else.

That was London. But in a town built by politicians for politicians, it’smuch, much worse. You can’t even build skyscraper in Washington,DC, because all buildings must be smaller than the WashingtonMemorial. The message is simple. Nothing here is bigger thanpolitics.

To explain that there’s a world outside their window, and it’s a worldof dread and fear, I felt compelled to buy some spray paint and aladder and write something appropriate in big red letters on theWhite House.

But when I got there I simply couldn’t believe my eyes. Put simply, Ilive in a bigger gaff than the president of America, and that’s notbragging because, chances are, you do too. It really is patheticallysmall.

All around there were television reporters revealing to their viewerssome snippet of useless information that they had picked up thenight before over a bowl of authentic Ethiopian pasta. And I wantedto say: ‘Look, stick to what’s important. Tell everyone that PresidentBush lives in a hut and, most of all, warn people that the X-1 displayat the Smithsonian is closed.’

at the Smithsonian is closed.’


Flying Round the World, No Seat is FirstClassAccording to recent scare stories, people on the 27-hour flight toNew Zealand have a simple choice. You can either die of deep veinthrombosis or you can die of cancer which is caused by radiation inthe upper atmosphere reacting with the aluminium skin of theaeroplane. Both options are better than surviving.

I boarded the plane at Heathrow and was horrified to note that I wasto share my section of the cabin with a couple of dozen pensionerson a Saga holiday. Great. Half were at the stage where they’d needto go to the lavatory every fifteen minutes, and half were at thestage where they didn’t bother with the lavatory at all.

But the seat next to me was free. So who am I going to get? PleaseGod, not the girl with the baby I’d seen in the departure lounge.There is nothing worse than sitting next to a girl with a baby on along-haul flight. I got the girl with the baby.

And then I was upgraded to first class. I didn’t stop to ask why. I justtook the moment by the bottom of its trouser leg, moved to the frontand settled down with my book. It was a big fattie called Ice Station,which promised to be the sort of page-turning rollercoaster thatwould turn the fat 11-hour leg to Los Angeles into a dainty littleankle.

Sadly, it turned out to be the worst book ever written. Just after thelone American marine had wiped out an entire French divisionsingle-handed, I decided to watch a movie instead. But since I’dseen them all, in their original formats, with swearing, I was stuck.

You can’t even talk to the stewardesses because they think you’retrying to chat them up and you can’t talk to the stewards either, for

trying to chat them up and you can’t talk to the stewards either, formuch the same reason. So I thought I’d get a drink, but of what?

My body clock said it was time for tea but I’d already moved mywatch and that said I should have a glass of wine. But I couldn’thave a wine because then I’d want a cigarette and you can’t do thaton a plane because, unlike a screaming baby, it’s consideredantisocial.

I know. I’ll look out of the window. I’ll look at this overcrowded worldin which we’re living. Well sorry, but for six hours there are no towns,no people and despite various claims to the contrary no evidence ofglobal warming. Just thousands upon thousands of miles of ice.

So I went back to my book and was halfway through the bit wherethe lone American was busy killing everyone in the SAS, when wedropped out of the clouds and into Los Angeles.

Time for a smoke. But this being California, that meant I had to gooutside, which meant I’d have to clear customs, which meant I hadto get in line with the Saga louts who’d all filled their forms in wrong.

I queued for an hour while the American passport-control people, ina bad mood because work stops them eating, barked at the oldbiddies and then realised that time was up. Unlike everywhere elsein the world, airlines in the States are allowed to take off with yourbags on board.

And so with a heavy heart and even heavier lungs I trudged back tothe 747 for the next, really long leg and found that my first-classseat had gone. But then so had the girl with the baby.

In her place there was a Californian beach babe who was going toAuckland with her equally volleyballish friend.

To begin with, I didn’t think too much of the fact they were holdinghands but as the flight wore on and they started holding rathermore intimate parts of one another’s bodies, the penny dropped.

I know I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve been told countlesstimes that people are born gay and that it’s not something thathappens because you’re too much of a boiler to pull a bloke. Sothere must be good-looking lesbians, too. It’s just that, outside films,you never see one.

I tried to read my book, in which the hero was now taking on andbeating the entire US Marine Corps using nothing but a rope ladder,but it was impossible to concentrate. And you try sleeping whenyou’re seventeen inches from two pneumatic blondes playing tonsilhockey.

Somewhere around the Fiji islands they went to sleep, and so did I,waking up an hour later when I moved my arm and the nicotinepatch tore a couple of armpit hairs clean out of their sockets.

After twelve hours we landed and I had forty minutes to make myconnection for Wellington which, even though the domestic terminalis a brisk fortnight’s walk away, was just about doable, providing allwent well in customs.

It didn’t. A man took my papers into a back room and emerged tenminutes later wearing rubber gloves. I damn nearly fainted.

Believe me, you do not want an intimate body search after a 27-hour journey. You don’t want an intimate body search after a 27-minute journey, come to think of it, but thankfully he limited hisprobing to my suitcase and I made the last flight with one minute tospare.

On it, I had another breakfast, finished my godawful book andtomorrow, after just 36 hours in Wellington, I’m coming home again.

tomorrow, after just 36 hours in Wellington, I’m coming home again.This is jet-set living? You can keep it.


They’re Trying to Lower the Pulse of RealLifeDid anyone else notice that, in the aftermath of last week’s traincrash, the newspapers were gripped with a sense of impotent rage?Try as they might, and some of them tried very hard indeed, theycouldn’t find anyone to blame.

The tracks hadn’t disintegrated. The train driver wasn’t four. Therewere crash barriers on the motorway bridge and the man in theLand Rover hadn’t fallen asleep. It had been an accident.

But, of course, there’s no such thing as an accident these days. Ifyou trip over a paving stone or eat a dodgy piece of meat, there willbe an inquiry, someone will be culpable, and steps will be taken toensure it doesn’t happen again.

We had a very wet autumn, as I’m sure you will recall, and as aresult many rivers burst their banks. But this was not an act of Godor a freak of nature. This was someone’s fault.

Nobody is allowed to just die, either. George Carman QC, forinstance, pegged out at the age of 71, which is not a bad innings.But oh no. His death has been chalked up to cancer, as though itmight have been avoided if he’d not eaten cheese and broccoli.

Well now look. The human being, and the human male in particular,is programmed to take risks. Had our ancestors spent their dayssitting around in caves, not daring to go outside, we’d still be therenow.

Sure, we’re more civilised these days, what with our microwaveovens and our jet liners, but we’re still cavemen at heart. We stillcrave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of a

crave the rush of adrenaline, the endorphin highs and the buzz of adopamine hit. And the only way we can unlock this medicine chest isby taking a risk.

Telling us that speed kills and asking us to slow down is a bit likeasking us to ignore gravity. We don’t drive fast because we’re in ahurry; we drive fast because it pushes the arousal buttons, makesus feel alive, makes us feel human.

Dr Peter Marsh, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford,says the recent rise in popularity of bungee jumping, parachutingand other extreme sports is simply man’s reaction to the safer,cotton-woolly society that’s being created.

He told me this week that, when the youth of Blackbird Leys inOxford was stealing cars and doing handbrake turns back in the1990s, a number of liberal commentators called to ask him why.

‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘These kids steal a really good car, take it backto their housing estate and charge around, with all their friendscheering and applauding. They are having a laugh, and making thepolice look like fools on television, and you have to ask why!’

Who has decided that we must live in a temperance society wherethere is no stimulation, no risk, no danger and no death?

In the past two months alone we’ve been told that water makes usmental, that coffee increases the risk of miscarriage, that lawnmowers cause deafness and that middle-aged men who dance willget ‘glamrock shoulder’.

A professor at Aberdeen University described washing-up bowls as‘an absolute menace’. We were told that snooker chalk causes leadpoisoning and that the new euro coins contain nickel, which willblister skin. There were warnings too that apples cause E-coli andthat mercury thermometers kill babies.

that mercury thermometers kill babies.

So where is all this rubbish coming from? Well, to be honest, it’sbeing imported from America, where scientists are now worried thata consignment of Play-Stations that has been sent to Iraq could belinked to form a crude supercomputer. This, they say, could then beused to pilot a chemical warhead all the way to Buffalo Springs.

Americans, remember, have got it into their heads that you can nowwage a war without losing a single soldier or airman, and we see thesame sort of thing with their weather too.

Instead of shrugging when a hurricane marches across Florida, or atornado tears up Oklahoma, they insist that the government doessomething about it. They want more warning, better protection.

Then of course there is the business of smoking.

Did you know that there are now porno websites in America whereyou can call up pictures of girls with farmyard animals, and then, atthe highest level, for members only, pictures of fully clothed girlsenjoying a cigarette?

And despite a few plaintive cries for help from the back of theWashington Post, the public over there seems to have bought intothis belief that life can, and should, be run without risk, that allaccidents are avoidable, and that death is something that onlyhappens to people who eat meat and smoke.

This is odd. From the outside, Americans appear to be human – alittle larger than normal, perhaps – but equipped nevertheless witharms and heads.

So how come they are able to overcome the base instincts thatdrive the rest of mankind?

I can think of only one answer. If they do not need risk andstimulation, they must be genetically malformed. There’s a simplerword for this. They must be mad.

Sunday 4 March 2001

Forget the Euro, Just Give Us a SingleSocketIf you were charged with the task of standardising an entirecontinent, from the Baltic to the Bosporus, I’m pretty sure you wouldcome up with a list of things that are slightly more pressing andimportant than a single currency.

Plug sockets, for a kick-off. How can it be that our MEPs havemanaged to homogenise a banana, yet they still allow each memberstate to offer a new and exciting way of getting electricity out of thewall?

This wasn’t so bad when we travelled with only a comb, but now thatwe need to charge up the batteries in our computers, mobiletelephones and electronic organisers it means we must pack a vastarray of adaptors; so many in fact that you now need to travel likean E. M. Forster heroine, with fourteen trunks and CummerbundAkimbo, your manservant.

And then the check-in girl has the temerity to ask if your bagscontain any electrical appliances. Damn right they do.

This is deeply maddening for me since I have always prided myselfon being able to survive abroad for up to a month on nothing buthand luggage. I have even developed a routine whereby one pair ofunderpants can be made to last for four days.

You wear them back to front on day two, inside out on day threeand then inside out and back to front on day four. I know acameraman who claims to have developed a combination thatallows a five-day switchover routine, but frankly I don’t believe him.

Then we have telephone connections, which in the past were of nogreat importance. But now we all have internets, how come there isno edict from Brussels on what is, and what is not, a standardsocket?

They launch the euro, which means I won’t need a wallet that bulgeswith different currencies. Big deal. Yet they’re happy to have mestomping around the Continent with enough cable in my suitcasesto build a suspension bridge.

It’s also very difficult with road signs. Only the other day, whilesearching Zurich for the A3 motorway to St Moritz, a blue sign saidturn left and a green sign said turn right. Blue is motorway, yes?Nope. Not in Switzerland it isn’t. The blue sign takes you on the sortof road that made the cabling in my suitcase look straight.

And lifts: why can’t there be a standard letter that denotes thereception level? It has been agreed that all across Europe prisonershave an inalienable right not to fall over and yet it is deemedacceptable for people like me to spend hours stabbing away atmeaningless buttons and emerging half a day later in the hotelboiler room.

Now I don’t want you to think that I long for the days whennewspapers ran headlines saying ‘Fog in the Channel. Europe cutoff’. I don’t subscribe to the British-is-best mentality, because wehave John Prescott and fuss and mutt. We have much to learn fromthe Continent.

Austrian lavatories, for instance, are plainly a good idea. There’s ashort flush for your number ones and a full-on Niagara for even themost stubborn number two. Then you have three-hour lunches inSpain and smoking bars on long-haul French airliners.

So, surely, if we must have European integration, it should be acase of taking the best bits that each country has to offer andblending them into the other member states.

Take customs officers. In Germany you get poked in the chest by ahippie with a gun, and woe betide anyone who tries to get a carnetsigned in France. I tried this last week and the man at the deskcouldn’t be bothered. He so couldn’t be bothered that, whenpressed, he hurled the form across his office, shouted ‘merde’ atnobody in particular and stomped off.

I want to see an implementation of the system they have in Italy, i. e.no system at all.

It might be useful, too, if we could find a universal butt for Europeanwit. We have the Irish, the Swedes have the Norwegians, the Dutchhave the Belgians and so on. What we need is a universal whippingboy so that jokes translate smoothly.

No, not the Welsh. At dinner last week in Austria, there were sixteenpeople round the table and, really, it was like a bunch of flowers.There were Scandinavians, Germans, Brits, Italians, the lot, and itwas great.

We explained the jokes for the Germans, the French chose thewine, the Italians ordered the food, the Austrians talked to thewaitress and the Dutchman spent his evening stopping the Swedefrom trying to commit suicide. We laughed at one another, jokedwith one another, learnt from one another and it was just the mostperfect evening; a shining example of European cooperation andharmony.

It was spolit by only one thing. There, in the middle of ourarrangement of roses, bougainvillea, edelweiss and tulips,complaining that we smoked and doing mock coughs to hammer the

complaining that we smoked and doing mock coughs to hammer thepoint home was a giant redwood: an American. He did notunderstand Wiener schnitzel and couldn’t grasp the notion that wewould want another round of drinks.

Sure, he was the perfect butt for all of us, but we must rememberthat he comes from a federal superstate where the plug sockets areall the same. It’s a worry.

Sunday 18 March 2001

I’d Have Laid Down My Life forWotsisnameThe court case involving Jonathan Woodgate threw up aninteresting dilemma last week when his best friend gave evidenceagainst him. So what do you do?

On the one hand, society cannot function without honesty, sotherefore you know it’s right to offer your services to theprosecution. But then again, friendship is supposed to be anunshakeable bond which cannot exist without loyalty. So it is alsoright that you should keep shtum.

Well, I thought about this long and hard in the shower this morningand I’ve decided I’d squeal like a baby. Because you knowsomething? Friendship is not an unshakeable bond at all. It’s like agigantic sand dune, seemingly huge and permanent, but one dayyou get up and it’s gone.

Back in the early eighties I spent pretty well every Saturday nightwith the same group of friends in a King’s Road basement barcalled Kennedy’s. We laughed all the time, we went on stage withthe band, we sang, we drank ourselves daft and we knew, with thesure-fire certainty that night will follow day, that we’d be mates forever.

Had one of them been accused of gouging the barman’s eyes outwith a lawnmower, I’d have told the police I was dead at the time andthat I knew nothing. I would even have taken the heat on his behalf,had push come to shove. Which would have made me feel awfullyfoolish today because I have no idea where two of those friendsare, and, for the life of me, I cannot even remember what the thirdone was called.

How did this happen? Presumably, when I said goodbye for the lasttime ever, I really did believe I’d be seeing them all again thefollowing weekend. It wasn’t like we’d had a row, or that they’d allgrown beards or moved to Kathmandu. We just went home andnever saw one another again.

And this happens all the time. I went through my address bookearlier and there are countless hundreds of people, friends,muckers, soul mates and former colleagues who I never ever see.

Here’s the problem. What I like doing most of all in the evenings,these days, is sitting in a gormless stupor in front of the television,eating chocolate.

Going out means getting up, getting changed, finding a babysitter,arguing about who’ll drive and missing Holby City. And quite frankly,that’s not something I’m prepared to do more than once a week. So,the most people I can hope to see in a year is 52, which means itwould take two years to see everyone in my Filofax.

Except, of course, it would take much longer than that in realitybecause people who I’m not seeing on purpose endlessly invite meround for dinner until eventually I’ve used every excuse in the book,up to and including being attacked by a Bengal tiger, and I have togo.

And then, as the day in question dawns, I mooch around the house,dreaming up the amount I’d pay to someone if they came throughthe door and offered me a guilt-free get-out-of-jail card. Once I gotup to £25,000, but still no one came, I had to go and, as a result,another week went by without seeing Mark Whiting, a friend from mydays on the Rotherham Advertiser .

And, of course, the more time that goes by, the harder it becomes

to call on people who you haven’t seen in ages. I mean, if someoneyou haven’t heard from in ten years suddenly telephones, you knowfull well that it’ll be for one of two reasons. He has lost his job. Or hehas lost his wife.

I have become so desperate about this friends business that Irecently asked my wife not to put any new people in the addressbook. I don’t care how nice they are. I don’t care if he is funny orthat she’s allergic to underwear. We have now got enough friends.

This went down badly and so we’ve reached an agreement. Newpeople can only go in the book providing old ones are Tipp-Exedout.

This is not easy. There’s one bloke called (name and addresswithheld because I’m weak) who I really don’t want to see again.Given the choice of people I’d call to ask for a night out, he’d comebelow the woman in the video-rental shop.

Worse. If I saw him coming down the street towards me, I’d pretendto be gay and lunge endlessly for his genitals until he went away.And if that didn’t work, I’d run into the nearest butcher’s and feedmyself into the bacon slicer.

But even so, as I stood there with the Tipp-Ex hovering above thiscrashing bore’s name, I could hear his voice in my head, and itsounded like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey . ‘Don’t do it, Dave.Remember all those nights we shared, Dave. I’ll try to be moreinteresting next time, Dave.’

I couldn’t do it and so now I’ve got a much more radical solution,pinched from anyone who’s ever tried toget out of a love affair withsomeone they don’t really love any more. I need him to ditch me.

So what I shall do, first thing in the morning, is take a leaf out of the

Leeds United book on friendship, call the police, and shop him forthat joint I saw him smoke back in 1979.


Creeping Suburbia isn’t Quite What IExpectedYou may be surprised to hear that the two words most feared bythose who live in the countryside are not ‘foot’ and ‘mouth’. Or ‘mad’and ‘cow’. Or even ‘Blair ’ and ‘Prescott’. No, out here the mostterrifying words in the English language are ‘Bryant’ and ‘Barratt’.

If the cows in our paddocks were to develop sores or a fondness forline dancing, we’d simply set fire to them. But this option would notbe available should one of the big development companies plonk adirty great housing estate at the end of our garden. And temptingthough it may seem, we couldn’t call in the armed forces, either.

‘Hello. Is that the RAF? Oh good. I’d like to call in a napalm airstrike,please, at these coordinates.’

When a housing estate comes to your little world you are stuffed.Your views are ruined, your house becomes worthless and youneedn’t expect much in the way of sympathy or compensation fromHis Tonyness.

Quite the reverse in fact, because unlike the spread of foot-and-mouth, which is being driven by the wind, the plague of housingdevelopments is actually being driven by Tony, who’s said that overthe next six minutes the countryside needs another 30 millionbungalows.

I went last week to exactly the sort of place that Tony has in mind.It’s a nearly completed development called Cambourne Village andit is to be found in the flatlands of Cambridgeshire between Roystonand Norway.

It’s big. So big that it’s been built by a consortium of all the bigdevelopers. There’s a business park, a high street, a pub that doesthe sort of food that is garnished with garnish, three village greens,a lake and a helmetless teenage boy who rides around the networkof roads all day on an unsilenced motorbike.

They’ve even tried to crack religion. Obviously, the vast majority ofpeople who’ll come to live in Cambourne will be white, middle classand Church of England. But, of course, in these days ofmulticulturalism you can’t just stick up one church and be done withit. So, to cope with that, the single church will bemultidenominational.

Quite how this will work in practice, I have no idea. Maybe there’s aninflatable minaret round the back somewhere. Maybe they hang upthe tapestries when the Catholics are in, and then it’s allwhitewashed when the lone Methodist from No. 32 fancies having abit of a sing-song.

I was thinking that this kind of thing might lead to jealousy, andmaybe even a small war. But then I thought of something else. Ifthere’s going to be any backbiting in Cambourne, it’ll be over whogets what house.

You see, unlike any estate I’ve ever seen, every single property inthe whole damn place – and there are more than 3,000 of them – isdifferent. Large, £260,000, double-fronted village houses with PVCsash windows and garages nestle right next door to small two-bedroom cottages which, in turn, are jammed up against three-bedsemis, some of which plainly have ensuite bathrooms and some ofwhich don’t.

This looked like an anthropologist’s worst nightmare. ‘Not only doesthe man at 27 have a wooden, Sussex-style garage for his BMW318i but he also has a 20 × 20 lawn, with a tree. And if you stand on

318i but he also has a 20 × 20 lawn, with a tree. And if you stand onthe avocado bidet in his back bathroom, he has a view of the lake!’

Sounds like a hideous way to live until you remember that all propervillages are like this. There’s a manor house, a dower house, asmithy, a home farm, some tied cottages, a council estate and a boyon a motorbike. It’s normal. What’s not normal are the housingestates of old, where every single property is exactly the same as allthe others. And everyone has a BMW 318i.

That is what’s wrong with Milton Keynes. Yes, you never sit in atraffic jam and yes, there’s always somewhere to park. But all thehouses are the same. They appear to have been pushed out of aHercules transport plane and parachuted into position.

In Cambourne, it’s all different. And some of it is very, very pretty.There’s one row that put me in mind of Honfleur in Normandy. Andas I wandered around, I started to feel little pangs of jealousy.

I thought I had it all worked out, living in the middle of the Cotswolds,but I have no neighbours to chat to and there are no other childrento keep mine amused. In Cambourne you can walk to the shops,walk to the pub, walk to church and walk to work. I could walk for twodays and I’d end up with nothing more than muddy shoes.

They’ve even got their own website, where residents can sellbicycles and share wife-swapping tips.

And they don’t even have to put up with the usual drawbacks ofvillage life like an annual bus service, tractors and men in jumpersdeafening all and sundry with their penchant for campanology.Though I would imagine that when the inflatable minaret is pumpedup, things might get a bit noisy.

But you know the absolute best thing about Cambourne? It’s not inOxfordshire. Which means it’s not in my back yard. It’s in

Oxfordshire. Which means it’s not in my back yard. It’s inCambridgeshire. Which means it’s in Jeffrey Archer’s.

Sunday 1 April 2001

Is It a Plane? No, It’s a Flying VegetableSo, the Bubbles have cancelled their order for 60 Euro-fighter jets,saying they need the money to pay for the Olympic Games. Well,thanks Mr Popolopolos.

That’s just great.

Eurofighter could, and should, have been a shining example of pan-European cooperation. One in the eye for Uncle Sam. The greatestground-attack ‘mud mover’ the world had ever seen. But instead itwill stand for ever more as a beacon, showing the world that afederal superstate can never work on this side of the Atlantic.

The idea for such a plane was first hatched back in the early 1970swhen Britain realised it would soon need a land-based fighterbomber to replace both the Jaguar and the Harrier. We couldn’tdesign such a machine by ourselves because we were on a three-day week at the time, so we went to see the French and theGermans.

The French said they already had a fighter, the Mirage, andtherefore only needed a bomber which could be used on aircraftcarriers. The Germans said they didn’t need a bomber since, foronce, they weren’t planning on bombing anyone. They needed afighter. And they absolutely were not interested in this aircraft-carrier business because they didn’t have any.

Obviously the whole thing was never going to work, so in the spiritof what was to come the three countries did the sensible thing,signed a deal and went back home to come up with somepreliminary studies.

Now, to understand the hopelessness of the position I would like youto imagine that they were not designing a warplane but a vegetable.So Britain came up with the potato, France designed a stick ofcelery, and Germany did a lobster thermidor. The project was dead.

But not for long. From nowhere, the Italians and Spanish suddenlydecided that they wanted a piece of the action and, flushed with theidea of these extra complications, a new contract was drawn up.

It was ever so straightforward. The amount of work, and thereforejobs, given to each country would depend on how many of thefighters they would buy. That was fair. But not to the French itwasn’t. They wanted one plane, 50 per cent of all the work and totalcontrol, and when they were told to get lost, they did.

Taking Spain with them.

So now it was Britain, Germany and Italy and it stayed that way forabout twelve seconds, when the Spanish fell out with the Frenchand asked to come back in again. So fifteen years after the projectwas first mooted and just eighteen months before the RAF neededits planes, the project at last was up and running.

Then disaster. The Berlin Wall fell over and all of a suddenEuropean governments lost the will to spend trillions on a plane thatwould have nobody to fight. The air forces, too, realised that ahighly manoeuvrable, Mach-2, dogfighting jet would have no placein the new world order. So it was agreed by everyone to keep going.

Germany and Britain were going to take 250 Euro-fighters each,which is why we each had 33 per cent of the workload. But in therecession of 1992 our governments wondered if this was a trifleexcessive. The RAF dropped its order to 232 planes and theLuftwaffe to just 140. But the German government insisted that itkept its share of the work. When everyone else kicked up a fuss it

kept its share of the work. When everyone else kicked up a fuss itthreatened to pull out.

Fearful that the pack of cards was about to come tumbling down,the Italians and Spanish went to lunch and the British got tough.Immediately, we gave in to the Germans.

However, the delay had thrown up a new problem: the name. Allalong it had been called Eurofighter 2000, but by 1994 it wasobvious that it could never be operational until 2001 at the earliest.So it became the Typhoon, which conjures up pictures ofdevastation and death.

Well, don’t get your hopes up. You see, Tony Blair recently decidedthat the plane’s missiles should be British rather than American.Good call, but the British weaponry won’t be available until eightyears after the jet goes into service. So what are the pilotssupposed to do in the meantime: make rude gestures?

That said, though, I have talked to various authoritative sourcesover the past year and it is widely thought that Eurofighter willbecome the world’s best fighter-bomber. It is desperately easy to flyand at £50 million a pop it is also extremely cheap. To put that inperspective, each new USAF F-22 Raptor will cost £115 million.

So Eurofighter is something about which Europe can be justifiablyproud. Should the Russians ever decide to invade, we will haveexactly the right sort of fire power to hold them back.

However, for dealing with sundry world leaders in far-flung parts ofthe globe, what you really need are aircraft carriers. Britain has justordered two and there was talk of modifying Eurofighter to becomeprecisely what the French wanted 30 years ago. But presumably itwas too much of an effort. So what have we done? Well, in a perfectspirit of European cooperation, we have teamed up with the

spirit of European cooperation, we have teamed up with theAmericans to build something called the Joint Strike Fighter. Thankyou, Europe, and goodnight.

Sunday 8 April 2001

Is This a Winner’s Dinner or a Dog’sBreakfast?No. I mean, yes. Yes, I have just been to Barbados but no, I didn’tstay at Winner Central, the newly reopened Sandy Lane hotel.Why? Because I checked, and for bed and breakfast only, afortnight there for a family of five would cost £44,000.

So, who’s going to fork out that kind of money for two clean sheetsand a croissant? Not David Sainsbury, that’s for sure. He wasstaying in our hotel down the road. And not the TetraPak Rausings,either. They were holed up in their bungalow.

Obviously, I had to find out and since you can’t just walk in for anosey, I had to bite the bullet and book a table for dinner. So I calledto make a booking and was told that if I didn’t turn up, $100 wouldbe deducted from my credit card. Christ. A hundred bucks for notgoing.

When you arrive you are shown by the doorman to a woman at thereception desk who shows you to a man who shows you to the doorof the restaurant, where a man shows you to the man who showsyou to your chair. I felt like the baton in a relay race.

Or rather I would have done but sadly I was still at the gate, in theback of a taxi being stared at by a guard with a piece of curly flexconnecting his ear to the back of his jacket. He probably thought itmade him look like an FBI agent, but in fact it just made him lookdeaf. Which is why I resorted to shouting at him.

I was told subsequently that it is poor form to turn up in a taxi andthat I should really have arrived in a proper car. Which would havemeant buying one. And that would have been even more expensivethan turning round and going home.I adn’t really gone to the Sandy

than turning round and going home.I adn’t really gone to the SandyLane for the food. I’d gone to see the people. So you can imaginethe crushing disappointment of finding that the restaurant was not asparkling sea of Cheshire Life gold shoes, with a sprinkling of noisyNew Yorkers. In fact, only two other tables were occupied.

To my right there was Bewildered Dotcom Man, who’d gone to bedone night, a struggling geek on 38p a year, and woken up the nextmorning to find he was worth $4 billion. He was wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, see-through white trousers and wasaccompanied by his wife, Janet.

To my left there was White Tuxedo Man. He was with his wife, Sylvia,to whom he uttered not one word. He spent most of the eveningeither reading the credit cards in his Filofax or talking into his mobilephone… which would have been impressive except that I have theabsolute latest Ericsson, which works on Everest, in the MarianaTrench and even in Fulham. But it couldn’t get a signal in Barbados,so sorry, sunshine, you weren’t fooling anyone.

So, with no other guests to laugh at, we thought we’d have a giggleat the food. Good idea, but I couldn’t find it.

It turned out that there was a sliver of what looked like corned beefon my plate, but it was so thin that when you tapped it with a knife itmade a clinking noise. I tried scooping it up with a fork, and then aspoon, but neither was successful, so in the end I gave up and justlicked the plate. What did it taste like? Well, meat, I guess, with aporcelain afterglow.

Then the water came. There had been an enormous song anddance with the wine but this was just a dress rehearsal for the mainevent. The waiter unscrewed the cap as though defusing a nuclearbomb and for one glorious moment I thought he was going to askme to sniff it.

me to sniff it.

But that would have been only mildly ridiculous. So instead, hepoured a splash into the glass for me to taste. ‘No, really. Unlessyou got it out of Michael Winner’s bath, just pour away. It’ll be fine.’

Drinking at the Sandy Lane, though, is nothing compared to whathappens when you need to expel it. In the lavatory you are offereda choice of bog roll – plain or embossed. And that is just soWilmslow.

Before leaving we were given a ballot paper on which we wereasked to vote for the evening’s ‘champion’, the waiter who’dimpressed us most. The losers, presumably, are lobbed into theshark pool.

And then we got the bill, which was the funniest thing of all because,when translated into English, it came to £220. The lobster-saladstarter, all on its own, had been £32, and for that I’d have expectedthe damn thing to get up and do a song and dance routine. Instead,it had just sat there, being a dead crustacean. A bit like WhiteTuxedo Man’s wife.

I don’t care what you read over the coming weeks by hacks onfreebies, the Sandy Lane is preposterous. If you were given all themoney in the world and told to design the most stupid restaurant onthe planet, you wouldn’t even get close. I mean, you wouldn’t thinkto put the waiters in pink trousers, would you? They have, though.And pink shirts.

But that said, it is a good thing. Every resort should have a placelike this, a giant black hole that hoovers up precisely the sort ofpeople that the rest of us want to avoid. Once you know they’rethere, you can go somewhere else.

Sunday 29 April 2001

Call This a Riot? It was a CompleteWashoutFollowing the success of last year’s anti-beefburger riot whenprotesters gave Winston Churchill an amusing Mohican haircut andplanted cannabis seeds in Parliament Square I was rather lookingforward to last week’s rematch. Obviously I was a little concernedthat my car might be turned over and burnt, so I booked achauffeur-driven Mercedes and spent the day hunting what JackStraw had promised would be a festival of rubber bullets andMolotov cocktails.

Secretly, I was hoping for some water-cannon action. There issomething really funny about the sight of an angry young womanbeing hosed into the gutter by a tank. If Jimmy Savile could becoaxed out of retirement, this would be top of my Fix It hit list: thechance to propel a vegetarian into the middle of next week.

I was also hoping that at some point I could sneak off and lob abrick through Pringle’s window on Regent Street. Just because.

But London was as quiet as the grave. All morning we cruised thestreets and all we saw was a man in a kaftan posing forphotographers at Marble Arch. And, like every other shop in town,Pringle had boarded-up windows.

Eventually we found the mob and I would like to bet that if I gaveyou 2,000 guesses, you’d never guess where they were. Whatsymbol of capitalism had drawn them to its portals: Nike Town,McDonald’s, the American Embassy? Nope. They were outside NewZealand House.

Except they weren’t. I counted 17 television crews, well over 100reporters and photographers, 75 policemen and… 14 protesters.

reporters and photographers, 75 policemen and… 14 protesters.

Disappointed, I went for lunch at the lvy hoping that somethingwould kick off in the afternoon. But it didn’t. I heard on the radio thatRegent Street was closed and so, keen to see if Pringle was underattack, I hurried over there to find 2,000 policemen dressed up asnavy seals surrounding two women who were so angry aboutsomething or other that they had decided to sit down in the middleof the road.

Unbelievable. The police had rented every van in Europe, there wasa helicopter chewing fuel in the sky and why? Because two womenwere cross about men, or student loans, or East Timor or whateverit is that angers women at university these days.

So what’s the problem here? How come every other city in the worldstaged a pretty good riot and all we got was a brace of lesbians –and I quote from radio reports – ‘throwing paper at the police’?

To understand why the British are so hopeless at getting off theirbacksides, we need to go back to the summer of 1381 and the so-called Peasants’ Revolt. A mob, seeking equality for all, had sackedLondon. They had burnt the houses of the rich, beheaded anyonedressed in velvet, opened prisons, drunk John of Gaunt’s wine andscattered financial records to the four winds. These guys were on aroll. The army had fled, the king, Richard II, was just fourteen yearsold and his bodyguards were so scared they had gone into hiding.Then the mayor of London compounded the problem by sticking hisdagger into the neck of the protesters’ leader, Wat Tyler.

Now you would think, wouldn’t you, that this would inflame thesituation somewhat. (If Ken Livingstone had stabbed one of thelesbians, the other would have become incandescent with rage.)But no. Ten days later, the rebels confronted the king who toldthem: ‘You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek

them: ‘You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seekequality with lords are unworthy to live.’ So they all went home.

How come? What was it that extinguished the fire in their bellies?Well, I have no proof of this because nobody was keepingmeteorological records in the fourteenth century but I’d like to betthat it started to rain.

A lot of people with vast foreheads have, over the years, wonderedwhy Britain has never had a successful uprising. Some say it’sbecause the monarchy was too powerful. Others argue that youcan’t have a revolution if you have a strong and contented middleclass.

Pah. I say it’s because of the drizzle. Last year’s May Day riot was asuccess because it was dry and quite warm. This one was awashout because it rained and we are brought up on a diet of partyinvitations that always say ‘If wet, in the village hall’. And you can’tchange the fabric of society from a venue that’s also used for parishcouncil meetings and line dancing.

There is some evidence to back up this theory. The night of 11 April1981 was dry and unseasonably warm. I know this because it wasmy twenty-first birthday. It was also the night of the Brixton riots.Then there was Toxteth and it wasn’t raining on the televisioncoverage of that, either.

Aha, you might say, but what about the Russian Revolution? Theyalso have rubbish weather so how did they get it together? Well,look at the dates. It began in early spring and it was all over byOctober. And when did the French storm the Bastille? It was 14 July.

Here’s a thought: the only reason why the Arabs and Jews havemanaged to keep their nasty little war going for 50 years is becauseit never bloody rains. If the post-war powers had put Israel in

it never bloody rains. If the post-war powers had put Israel inManchester, there’d have been no bloodshed at all.

Sunday 6 May 2001

Being a Millionaire is Just One Step frombeing SkintSo, the other night, I was sitting around after dinner playing theboard game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with Hans and EvaRausing.

At first, I was slightly bothered that they didn’t seem terriblyinterested in getting the questions right but then, of course, it struckme. As builders of the TetraPak fortune, becoming a millionairemeans taking a significant step backwards.

It made me laugh. And then it made me think. Even if we leavebillionaires out of the equation, who does want to be a millionairethese days? I mean, £1 million is just enough to ensure that youlose all your friends but not quite enough to buy anythingworthwhile.

You see those poor souls with Chris Tarrant, shuffling up to thecentre of the stage with their shirts not tucked in and their dreadfulshoes, saying that, if they won the big prize, they’d buy an islandand move there with Meg Ryan. No you wouldn’t.A million doesn’teven get you a decent flat in Manchester these days and, even if itdid, you’re not going to pull Meg Ryan with it.

The simple facts of the matter are these. Fifty new millionaires arecreated in this country every day. When American Express launchedits plutocratic black card, the initial print run of 10,000 was snappedup in days.

According to the Inland Revenue, more than 3,000 people earnedmore than £1 million last year, which means there are now 100,000people across the country who have a million or more in liquidassets.

assets.

But if you include people whose houses or shares in companies areworth more than seven figures, then you arrive at an alarmingconclusion. There are probably half a million millionaires in Britain.

So why, then, can you hear yourself think this morning? Why is thesky not full to overflowing with Learjets and helicopters? How comeyour dog is not cowering under the table in case someone tries toturn it into a coat? Why isn’t everyone married to Meg Ryan? Whydoes Pizza Express not offer a panda-ear and tiger-tail topping?

These days, to live what we still perceive to be a millionaire lifestyle,you need to have a damn sight more than £1 million.

How much more, though, that’s the question. Back in 1961 VivNicholson won £152,000 on the pools and promptly embarked on apink and furry spending spree, commensurate with what in today’smoney would be £3 million. And it lasted precisely fifteen yearsbefore she went broke.

A recent report said that, to live the super-rich lifestyle today, with apersonal stylist to do your hair and a fast, convertible car to mess itup again, you actually need£5 million, but I’m not sure that this isgoing to keep you in pointy shoes and Prada.

I mean, Mr Blair is going to help himself to 40 percent, leaving youwith£3 million, which becomes£2.5 million once you’ve set aside alittle something for school fees.

You then buy the big house in the country, and that leaves you withliquid assets of£1 million, which sounds great. But hang on aminute: you’re part of the so-called super-rich now, so you canforget about holidaying at CenterParcs. You’re going to be takingthe family and the nanny, in the front of the aeroplane, to theCaribbean every year.

Caribbean every year.

Lovely, but do that for twenty years at £50,000 a pop and you’ll gethome one day to find a letter from the bank manager saying he is‘disappointed to note that you have no money left’.

All you’ll have to show for your£5 million is a suntan, a terracedhouse and surly children who would rather have gone to the localcomp.

I suspect that to live a boat-filled, choppery existence off Venice oneminute and St Kitts the next, you actually need £10 million. But then,if you have this much, if your bank balance is bigger than youraccount number, you’re going to spend every night for the rest ofyour life at charity auctions being expected to stick your hand upand buy the big lot: the signed Frankie Dettori underpants.

Every day you’ll be approached by people who either need backingfor their new publishing venture in Azerbaijan or an operation fortheir not-very-ill six-yearold niece.

Oh sure, other very rich people will ask you to come and stay attheir Tuscan villas but, when you get there, you’ll have to share abreakfast table with a man who runs guns for the Iranians, a womanwith an Argentine accent who’s permanently bored and a gaggle ofairheads who throw you in the pool.

You’ll ricochet from pillar to post, a one-man social-servicesdepartment until, one day, your wife shacks up with the under-gardener and you end up alone in the Savoy, knowing that all thefriends you used to have are sharing a bottle of Bulgarian plonk in aChiswick pizza joint, laughing a lot and carefully splitting the billafterwards.

I therefore have a new idea for a television game show. It’s calledWho Doesn’t Want to be a Millionaire Any More? All the contestants

Who Doesn’t Want to be a Millionaire Any More? All the contestantsare super-rich and the idea is to give away as much money aspossible in the shortest time.

The trouble is, of course, that nobody would phone the hotline.They’d all be at home with their lovely wife Meg, admiring theirsigned Frankie pants.

Sunday 13 May 2001

What Does It Take to Get a Decent MealRound Here?At this time of year Country Life magazine swells as its propertypages fill to overflowing with six-bedroom manor houses, each ofwhich can be bought for the price of a stamp.

You may be tempted by the notion of a crunchy gravel drive and aselection of stone mushrooms, but before taking the plunge lookcarefully at the photograph of the ‘far-reaching view’. There’snothing in it, is there? Just fields, foxes and a millstone grit outcropon the far horizon.

It may appear to be pleasant and tranquil but it’s going to be a bigproblem when you’re looking for a restaurant. You see, fields do noteat out. Millstone grit outcrops are not to be found demanding aglass of Sauternes to wash down the pudding. Foxes don’t likecappuccino.

On Tuesday my wife and I were celebrating eight years of perfectwedded bliss and thought it would be fun to toast the moment with asimple but expensive dinner somewhere posh.

Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons is not too far away but frankly it mayas well be on the moon because we’re not going again. Why? Thelast time we went it was hosting a convention for photocopyingengineers who spoilt the evening somewhat by making me pose forphotographs with their cars.

No matter. There used to be a great restaurant in Oxford called theLemon Tree, but now it has new owners who said that if we wishedto smoke, we would have to sit in a special raised area. Thissounded a bit like a naughty chair. So that was out.

The Petit Blanc was crossed off the list next because, oddly, it onlyallows smoking at weekends. Owner Ray White should be advisedthat people who smoke do so because they have to. It’s not likefishing. Tell someone they can’t go to the canal until Saturday andthey’ll be fine, whereas smokers won’t. They’ll start eating yourtablecloths, and if you object, you’ll be on the receiving end of whatI now believe is known as ‘a Prescott’.

After an hour on the phone it looked like we’d have to give up andeat in a pub which, as I’m sure you know, is slightly less appealingthan eating the pub itself. The only thing I can say about ‘pub grub’is that it tastes like I cooked it. And I am the only person in the worldwho can make cauliflower taste like the back of a fridge freezer.

Eventually, we found a rather nice smoker-friendly fish restaurantcalled Dexters in Deddington, which is a local place for local people,all of whom were not celebrating their wedding anniversaries, orindeed anything. That’s why they were at home and we were theonly people in there.

So, one has to presume, it will eventually close or ban smoking andthen that’ll be it. We’ll have to start eating the millstone gritoutcrops.

I’m not kidding. I live in the Cotswolds, one of the most affluent,sought-after areas in the whole country – a six-bedroom manorhouse round here costs more than a whole book of stamps – andyet there is only one worthwhile restaurant within a half-hour’s drive.One. And it’s empty.

However, before everyone in London splits in half with mirth I shouldpoint out that the three worst meals I’ve ever eaten were all at well-known restaurants in Notting Hill. Last week.

In one we were told by a waiter, who looked like his house had justburnt down, that the chef had messed up the food and that most ofit was off. We never saw the wine we ordered, my crab starter wascovered in wallpaper paste and after two hours the main course stillhadn’t turned up at all.

And I’m not alone. Everyone I’ve talked to recently is saying thattheir favourite restaurant is starting to deliver what tastes likehamster droppings to table 9 at 10 p.m., when it should have goneto table 14 at 7 p.m.

But this was inevitable because while the countryside has norestaurants at all, London has far too many. Take West End Lane inHampstead. It used to be a shopping street but all they can offernow, apart from a haircut and a bijou flat for the price ofGloucestershire, is a plate of spaghetti that should have gone totable 8 last week.

A year ago the situation was so bad that restaurateurs werereduced to trawling Paris for waiting staff. Some reports suggestedthat as many as 10,000 surly, off-hand Pierres had migrated toLondon. And that was then.

Now, with more and more new restaurants opening every day, I’msurprised Marco Pierre White isn’t to be found at the traffic lightsoffering jobs to passing motorists. Hell, I’m surprised he isn’t offeringthem to the Albanian window washers.

You see, it’s all very well employing the best chef in the world, butwhat’s the point if you can’t find someone to take it from the kitchento the dining room? Well, someone with a sense of direction and abasic grasp of English anyway.

I was disappointed the other day when my six-yearold daughter saidshe wanted to be a waitress when she grew up. The way things are

she wanted to be a waitress when she grew up. The way things aregoing she could get a job now. Unfortunately though, there aren’tany openings round here. Indeed, the only place where you can geta decent steak is called a pyre.

Sunday 20 May 2001

Cutting Lawns is the Last Word inCivilisationHaving seen Emmanuelle in Bangkok, I thought I knew what amassage would be like. Well it isn’t.

The first disappointment comes when you find that there will only beone masseuse, and the second when you discover that his name isBill.

Then things really start to go pear-shaped. After asking you toundress and lie face-down on the bed, he’ll tell you that you’retense. And you’ll want to reply that this is not surprising becauseyou were not expecting someone who learnt all about bodypressure points while serving as a Spetsnaz assassin. But all you’llmanage is a muffled ‘Aaaaaaaargh’.

Be assured, a proper massage gives you some idea of what it wouldbe like to fall down a mountain while locked in a fridge freezer. Itwould be more relaxing to have your fingernails torn out while beingforce-fed with used engine oil.

I have discovered that the best way of soothing away the stressesand strains of the working week is to mow the lawn. Sitting there,with the sun on your back, concentrating on nothing but going in astraight line and not running over the flowers, you can actually feelyour muscles turning to jelly and your teeth unclenching.

And then, when you’ve finished, you can stand back with yourhands on your hips and admire the sheer geometric perfection ofthat verdant test card, that subtle blend of absolute straightness ina curved and wild world. You have taken on nature and, withnothing more than a Honda Lawnmaster, brought civilisation andorder to the unruly forces of nature. Well done. You are now a lawn

order to the unruly forces of nature. Well done. You are now a lawnbore.

You will start shouting at your children if they ride their bicycles onyour immaculate conception. You will tut when you find discardedcigarette butts. You will stand for hours in the garden centre eyingup trowels, and you will talk about Roundup with your friends in thepub.

I am now such a lawn bore that when I discovered a thistle that haddared to show its hideous, ugly face in my perfect turf I shot it.

And while I like having a fighter plane in the garden – it’s better thana water feature because the children can’t drown in it – I wasinconsolable when I saw the damage that had been done while itwas being towed into position. There were three grooves, each afoot deep, stretching all the way from the broken electric gates tomy dead yew hedge.

This, you see, is my problem. I want to be a gardener. I want apotting shed and some secateurs. I want Homes & Gardensmagazine to profile my work, but all I can do is cut grass. Everythingelse turns to disaster.

Two years ago the field across the road was planted with saplingsand I bought precisely the same stuff for a patch of land next to mypaddock. Today, his trees are 12–14 feet tall. Mine have beeneaten by hares.

I filled the grooves in the lawn with ten tons of the finest topsoilmoney can buy and then, to speed the repair along, mixed somegrass seed with the most expensive organic compost in the worldand sprinkled it all on top. And the result? Three long and unsightlystrips of mushrooms.

I was assured that my yew trees would grow at the rate of a footevery twelve months but they did nothing of the sort. For the firsttwo years they just sat there and then they decided to die. So theydid.

So I was intrigued last week by the fierce debate that appeared tohave been raging at the Chelsea Flower Show.

There are those who like gardens to be traditional, a Technicolorriot of flora and fauna harmonised to create a little piece ofharmonised chaos. These people are called gardeners.

Then you have the modernists who think it is much better to throwaway the plants and replace them with stark concrete walls andgravel. These people are called Darren and you see them everyweek on Ground Force.

The Darren philosophy is tempting. First of all, you get a quick fix, awell-planned and attractive garden in a couple of hours. Andsecond, the whole thing can be maintained by taking the Hoover toit once a year.

But these modern gardens do feel a bit like rooms without roofs,and you will lose things in the gaps of your decking. I know one manwho lost his wife down there.

So what about the gardening option? Well, all things considered, itdoesn’t sound quite so good. I mean, what’s the point of planting anoak tree when the best that can happen is that it stops being a twigjust in time for the birth of your great-great-great-grandson. And theworst is that it commits suicide.

Furthermore, if you go down the gardening route, you will have tospend your entire retirement in crap clothes with your head betweenyour ankles. You will then get a bad back and that will requireterrifying and undignified weekly appointments with Bill at the

terrifying and undignified weekly appointments with Bill at themassage parlour.

So what’s the answer then? Well, I’ve just bought an acre or so andI’m going to employ the third way. I’m going to do absolutely nothing,and next year I shall call it ‘the New Labour wilderness’, andtransport it to Chelsea where it will win a gold medal.

Sunday 27 May 2001

An Invitation from My Wife I Wish I CouldRefuseWhat would life be like if parties had never been invented? Tentswould still be used solely as places for Boy Scouts to sleep, therewould be no such thing as a plate clip and you would never haveheard an amateur speech.

There would be no black tie, no parking in paddocks, no chance ofrunning into former spouses and you would never have drunk awarm Martini, garnished with ash, at four in the morning becausethe rest of the booze had run out.

We’re not even programmed to enjoy parties that much. Think.When you were little you liked your teddy and you liked your mum,but other children were the enemy. You were forced to go, and saton your bottom waiting to be humiliated by someone saying: ‘Ohdear. Who’s had a little accident then?’

You always have little accidents at parties. No sooner are you out ofnappies than you’re straight into the flowerbed where the hostess’smother finds you face down at dawn. And then when you’re married,you get in huge trouble for dancing with the wrong girl in the wrongway for too long.

I mention all this because three weeks ago I caught the perfectillness. There was no pain, just an overwhelming need to lie in bedall day eating comfort food and watching Battle of the Bulge.

I was enjoying myself very much, but halfway through the afternoonmy wife tired of popping upstairs with trays of quails’ eggs andmushroom soup and, with that hands-on-hips way that wives havewhen their husbands are not very ill, announced that I should get upand organise a party for her fortieth birthday. ‘You have 21 days.’

and organise a party for her fortieth birthday. ‘You have 21 days.’

My first chance to have a little accident came with the invitations.Every morning we get invites but we have no idea who they are fromor where the party is being held because the typeface is ameaningless collection of squirls, and all the instructions at thebottom are in French. RSVP.

I thought the solution would be simple. Write in block capitals anduse English. But oh no. Nowadays, it’s important to make yourinvitation stand out on the mantelpiece, so it must be written on aningot or a CD-Rom or on a man’s naked bottom.

The printer was quite taken aback when I asked for card. ‘Card?’ hesaid. ‘Gosh, that really is unusual.’ And then he gave me anestimate: ‘For 150 invites, sir, that will be £6.2 million. Or you couldgo down to Prontaprint and have exactly the same thing for 12p.’Right.

The next problem is deciding on a dress code. What you’resupposed to do these days is dream up a snappy phrase such as‘Dress to thrill’ or ‘Urban gothic’, but since none of our friends wouldhave the first clue what any of this meant, I put ‘No corduroy’.

With just two weeks to go I called a party organiser to help out withthe event itself. ‘All we want,’ I explained, ‘is a bit of canvas to keepthe wind off everyone’s vol-au-vents.’

Well, it doesn’t work out like that because he sits you down andsays that you really ought to have some kind of flooring. It’s only£170. So you say fine. And then he says that electricity might be agood idea, too. It’s only £170. Everything is only £170, so you endup ordering the lot.

When the estimate came, I really was ill. ‘What would you like?’asked my wife, seeing that this time I wasn’t faking. ‘Some fish

asked my wife, seeing that this time I wasn’t faking. ‘Some fishfingers? A nourishing bowl of chicken soup? Where Eagles Dare?’No. What I want is for everyone we’ve invited to come over all dead.

It was not to be. With a week to go, only six had had the decency tosay no and the next day, two changed their minds.

Except, of course, we hadn’t heard a whisper from anyone who hasever appeared on television. It is a known fact that once you’vebeen on the electric fish-tank, even if it’s just for a moment in aDixons shop window, you lose the ability to reply to party invitations.

So you’ve got the caterers asking how many they should cook forand you’re having to say they’d better get Jesus in the kitchenbecause it could be five or it could be five thousand.

Then the guests start telephoning asking what they should wearinstead of corduroy and where they can stay. Here’s a tip. Whenyou’re looking for a hotel in Chipping Norton, you’re more likely tofind out what’s good and what’s not by calling someone in Glasgow.People who live in Chipping Norton usually have no need of localhotels. And I don’t care what you wear. And yes, your ex-husbandwill be here. And no, I’m not going to tow you out of the paddock if itturns into a quagmire.

You’ll probably have a miserable time but look at it this way. It’ll bemuch more miserable for me, and even more miserable for the poorold dear who lives next door. As the band wheeled in their speakerstacks, I called her to explain that there might be a bit of noise onSaturday night. ‘Oh I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘What is it? A dinnerdance?’

No, not really, it’s more a chance for all my wife’s wildly disparategroups of friends to come and not get on with each other.

Sunday 10 June 2001

How Big a Mistake are You Going toMake?Many years ago, when I was working as a local newspaper reporter,the editor sent me to cover the inquest of a miner who’d beensquashed by an underground train.

Hours into the interminable proceedings a solicitor acting for theNational Coal Board told the court that the deceased ‘could’ havestood in an alcove as the train passed. And I wrote this down in mycrummy shorthand.

But unfortunately, when I came to write the story, I failed totranscribe the meaningless hieroglyphics properly. So what actuallyappeared in the paper was that the man ‘should’ have stood in analcove as the train passed.

Well, there was hell to pay. Damages were handed over. Aprominent apology was run. The lawyer in question shouted at me.The family of the dead man shouted at me. The editor shouted atme. The proprietor shouted at me. I was given a formal writtenwarning about my slapdash attitude. And here I am, twenty yearslater, with my own column in the Sunday Times.

We hear similar stories from the City all the time. Some trader,dazzled by the stripes on his shirt, presses the wrong button on hiskeyboard and the stock market loses 10 per cent of its value. Hegets a roasting and later in the year spends his seven-figure bonuson a six-bedroom house in Oxfordshire.

So I feel desperately sorry for the Heathrow air traffic controller whowas found last week to be guilty of negligence when he tried to landa British Airways 747 on top of a British Midland Airbus. He hasbeen demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis bats

been demoted and sent in eternal shame to wave table tennis batsat light aircraft in the Orkneys.

The problem here is that we all make mistakes, but the result ofthese mistakes varies drastically depending on the environment inwhich we make them.

When a supermarket checkout girl incorrectly identifies a piece ofbroccoli as cabbage and you are overcharged by 15p, nobodyreally cares.

But what about the man who incorrectly identified a live bullet asblank, put it into the magazine of an SA-80 army rifle and heardlater that a seventeen-year-old Royal Marine had been killed as aresult?

The inquest last week recorded a verdict of accidental death andnow the dead soldier’s father is said to be considering a privateprosecution and a civil action against the people responsible for hisson’s death. I don’t blame him, of course. I would do the same. Butthe fact remains that as mistakes go, loading the wrong bullets intoa magazine is exactly the same as loading the wrong informationabout broccoli into a checkout weighing machine.

Think about the chap who was employed by P&O ferries to shut thefront doors on the car ferry Herald of Free Enterprise. I have nodoubt that he performed his badly paid, noisy, repetitive andunpleasant job with the utmost diligence until one day, for reasonsthat are not clear, he forgot.

Now if he had been a warehouseman who forgot to shut the factorygates when he left for the night, there may well have been aburglary. And that may well have put a dent in the insurancecompany’s profit and loss account. But he wasn’t a warehousemanand, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the car

and, as a result of his momentary lapse, water rushed into the cardeck and 90 seconds later the ship was on its side. And 193 peoplewere dead.

He was not drunk at the time. He did not leave the doors open tosee what would happen. He just fell asleep.

So what’s to be done? Well, you can employ the Health and SafetyExecutive to dream up the most foolproof system in the world, thesort of money-no-object set-up that I’m sure is employed atHeathrow. But the fact remains that all systems rely on humanintegrity to some extent and, if someone takes their eye off the ballfor a moment, two jets with 500 people on board can get within 100feet of one another.

Or you could argue that people who hold the lives of others in theirhands should be paid accordingly. But I don’t think the size of aperson’s bank balance affects their ability to concentrate. I mean,His Tonyness is on £163,000 a year and he makes mistakes all thetime.

No. I’m afraid that fairly soon we are going to have to accept that ablame culture does not work. We are going to have to accept thatdoctors, no matter how much training you give them, will continue tostick needles into people’s eyes, rather than their bottoms. We aregoing to have to accept that, once in a while, Land Rovers will crashonto railway lines causing trains to crash into one another. We aregoing to have to stop penalising people for making that most humanof gestures – a mistake.

And the best way of doing this is to ban those ‘Injured at work?’advertisements for solicitors on the backs of buses.

So long as there’s an opportunity to profit from the simple,unintentional mistakes of others, then there will always be a desire

unintentional mistakes of others, then there will always be a desireto do so. To lash out. To blame. To turn some poor unfortunate soulwho just happened to be in the wrong job on the wrong day into ahuman punchbag.

Sunday 17 June 2001

America, Twinned with the FatherlandEurope offers the discerning traveller a rich and varied tapestry ofalternatives. You may go salmon fishing in lceland or sailing offGreece. You may get down and dirty on the French Riviera or highas a kite in Amsterdam. You can bop till you drop in Ibiza or cop ashop in London. And we haven’t even got to Italy yet.

So why then do a significant number of Americans, having decidedto take that vacation of a lifetime over here, always start the tour inGermany? Because Germany is to holidays what Delia Smith is tospot welding. Perhaps it’s because they’ve heard of it. Maybe theyhave a brother stationed at Wiesbaden or perhaps their father didsome night flying over Hamburg back in 1941. Yes, I know that’sbefore America joined the war, but judging by the movie PearlHarbor, they don’t.

Or maybe in the brochures Germany somehow looks appealing toan American. I mean, both peoples tend to eat a little more thanthey should and both have a fondness for driving very largeautomobiles, extremely badly. Both countries also have absolutelyhopeless television programmes where the hosts dress up in vividjackets and shout meaningless instructions at the contestants. AnAmerican flicking through the 215 one-size-fits-all alternatives in hisStuttgart hotel room would feel right at home. Until he got toChannel 216, after midnight, and found a whole new use for a dog.

Both countries enjoy the same British exports, too: Benny Hill, MrBean, Burberry mackintoshes. Then there’s the question of taste.Only two countries in the world would dream of teaming a tangerinebathroom suite with purple and brown carpets. And only twocountries go around pretending to be democracies while burdeningthe people who live there with enough regulations and red tape tostrangle everyone in China. Twice. In Germany, you must not brake

strangle everyone in China. Twice. In Germany, you must not brakefor small dogs and you must have a licence before you can playgolf. An American would nod sagely at that.

So, it would appear that Germany and America are identical twinsand now you may be nodding sagely, remembering that some 25per cent of Americans are derived from German stock. Indeed,shortly after Independence, there was a vote in the Senate onwhether the official language of the fledgling USA should be Englishor German.

Whatever, a great many Americans spend vacation time in theFatherland, including, just last week, a retired couple from Michigancalled Wilbur and Myrtle. They packed their warm-weather gear intoa selection of those suitcases that appear to be made from oldoffice carpets, got their daughter Donna to drive them from thegated community they call home to Detroit airport, where they flewfor their holiday to Cologne.

Myrtle had packed some powdered milk because she’d caught areport about foot-and-mouth disease in Europe and figured she’dbetter stay safe. Wilbur was worried about catching KGB from beefthat had been infected with BSM and vowed on the plane he’d stickto chicken. Both wondered if you could get chicken in Europe.

I know this because I know the man who lent them a car. They likedhim very much, not simply because he spoke such good English butalso because, contrary to what they’d heard, he could stand on hishind legs. Myrtle asked whether they should go to Munich becausean antiques fair was in town or if it was better to visit Frankfurtwhich, she’d heard, was the Venice of Germany. ‘Well,’ explained myfriend, ‘there is a river in Frankfurt but it’s probably stretching thingsa little to think of it in the same terms as Venice.’

Still undecided, they set off, and that should have been that. Butjust two hours later they were on the phone. It seems that they’dbecome a little confused and strayed into Holland, where they’dfound a charming little cafe´ that did chicken.

Unfortunately, however, while they were inside someone had brokenthe back window of their car and helped themselves to all theirbelongings: not only the Huguenot felt-tile suitcases but also theirpassports, driving licences and Wilbur’s wallet.

Maybe the thief was a drug addict after his next fix. Or maybe he’dmistaken them for Germans and had taken everything in exchangefor the theft of his father’s bicycle. Or perhaps he’d taken umbrageat their registration plate. All Cologne-registered cars this yearbegin with KUT, which is Dutch for the worst word in the world.

Either way, poor old Wilbur and Myrtle were not having much luckwith the police, either in Holland or Germany, to which they’dreturned. They decided after just six hours in Europe that they’dhad enough and were going to fly home. So they did.

The problem is, of course, that while Germany may superficiallyhave some things in common with America, it is not even remotelysimilar once you go beneath the surface. There’s no ‘have a niceday’ culture in Germany. The German does not care if you have anice day because he is a European.

I’m writing this now in a town called Zittau on the Polish border. I feelat home here.

Sunday 24 June 2001

Cornered by a German Mob Bent onRevengeSo there I was, cruising into town with the top down when, with thecrackle of freshly lit kindling, my map hoisted itself out of thepassenger side footwell and, having spent a moment wrappedround my face, blew away.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem. I had the name of a barwhere I could watch the Grand Prix and I even had its address. So Iwould simply pull over and ask someone for directions.

Unfortunately, I was in Germany where, if someone doesn’t knowexactly what you are looking for, they won’t tell you at all. To makematters worse, I was in the eastern part of the country where thereare no people to ask anyway.

I first noticed the problem in the achingly beautiful Saxony town ofZittau which, at 8.30 on a Friday night, was deserted. It was like ascene from On the Beach. Further up the autobahn in the city ofZwickow, Aida was playing at the opera house but there were noqueues. The shops were full of expensive cutlery sets but therewere no shoppers. There were car parks but no cars.

The latest figures suggest that since the Berlin Wall came down,some towns have seen 65 per cent of the population migrate to thewest in search of work. I do not believe this. If 65 per cent havegone, then 35 per cent must still be there. Which begs the question:where the bloody hell are they?

West Germans are paying a special 7 per cent tax at the momentfor a new infrastructure in the east. Chancellor Kohl promised thiswould last for three years but twelve years have elapsed and stillthe spending goes on.

the spending goes on.

A recently leaked report from Wolfgang Thierse, the Germanparliamentary speaker, painted an apocalyptic picture of the east asa region on the verge of total collapse. We think we have problemswith migration from the north of England to the south-east but oursare small fry and we are not hampered by having the lowest birthrate in the world.

In the year before unification 220,000 babies were born in EastGermany. Last year just 79,000 births were recorded.

They are pumping billions into the former GDR so that everythingover there is either freshly restored or new. The lavatories flush witha Niagara vigour. Your mobile phone works everywhere. The roadsare as smooth as a computer screen. But it’s like buying a new suitfor someone who is dead.

And that brings me back to Sonderhausen on that boiling Sunday,when I had twenty minutes to find the bar before the German GrandPrix began.

With nothing but the sun for guidance, I just made it and in my rushfailed to notice that the bar was located in the worst place in theworld. It was a quadrangle of jerry-built communism; a faceless ten-storey, four-sided slab of misery and desolation. And there, in themiddle of it all, was the Osterthal Gastshalle.

I have drunk at roughneck bars in Flint, Michigan, and Kalgoorlie inWestern Australia. I am no stranger to the sort of places where theoptics are rusty and the chairs are weapons. But the Osterthal wassomething else. The only light came from a brewery sign above thebar and a fruit machine in the corner. But this was enough to notethat there were eight people in there, none of whom had any teeth.

But, I said to myself, this is okay. This is a mining town. I’m from amining town. I know that in mining towns you don’t ask for a glass ofchilled Chablis. So I ordered a beer and settled back to watch therace.

It did not last long. Pretty soon one of the toothless wonderssauntered over and offered the international hand of friendship. Acigarette. Except it wasn’t a cigarette. It was called a Cabinet and itwas like smoking liquid fire. ‘Is good yah?’ said the man, helpinghimself to fistfuls of my Marlboros.

Then things grew a little serious. Could I, he asked, explain whatwas written on the television screen? It’s just that despite the much-vaunted school system in the old GDR, he couldn’t read. But hecould speak English, providing we stuck to old Doors lyrics.

Have you ever tried this: commentating on a motor race usingnothing but the words of Jim Morrison? It’s difficult. ‘Heinz-HaraldFrentzen. This is the end. You’ll never look into his eyes again.’ Bylap 50 I was struggling badly and, to make matters worse, they hadeach consumed 150 litres of beer and were ready for a good fight.

Ordinarily, I guess, they would ram each other’s heads into the fruitmachine but today they had a much better target: me, the westerngit. A living, breathing example of the faceless capitalistic machinethat had moved into their town, bought the mine, asset-stripped itand shut it down.

They had lost their jobs, the free kindergarten places for theirchildren and most of their friends. In exchange they had got a newsewage system. Now I was facing a simple choice: watch the end ofthe race or get my head kicked in.

What these people want, more than anything, is to have the Berlin

Wall back. What I want, more than anything, is to know who won theGrand Prix.

Sunday 1 July 2001

Wising Up to the EU After My Tussles inBrusselsOrdinarily I don’t talk about the European Union. But when you arein Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the capital of Europe, it’shard to stay off the subject for long.

Yesterday I settled down in an agreeable square with a charmingand erudite Irish girl who has lived here for four years. We spentfour seconds on the prettiness of Bruges, eleven seconds talkingabout Jean-Claude Van Damme and then I could contain myself nolonger.

‘What exactly,’ I demanded brusquely, ‘has the EU done for me?’

I’m sorry, but the night before I had arrived at the Presidents Hotelbehind two coachloads of tourists who could neither read norunderstand the fantastically enquiring registration cards. It’sinteresting, isn’t it: you don’t need a passport to enter Belgium, butyou do need a passport number before they will let you stay thenight.

Still, it was only a small wait of two hours before I was issued with akey to what was basically a double-bedded blast furnace.Immediately, I knew this hotel was designed and run entirely for thebenefit of visiting Americans, a people who seem unable to copeunless a room is either hot enough to boil a fox or cold enough tofreeze nitrogen.

By 1 a.m. I had dragged my pillow into the minibar and was tryingdesperately to get some sleep when the man next door decidedwhat he’d like to do most of all was to play squash. So he did. Forabout an hour.

Having worked up a sweat, he then decided that what he neededwas a nice long shower. So he did that for an hour, too. Then hefigured it would be a good time to call the folks back home in lowa.Although why he used the phone I am not entirely sure.

‘Hey Todd,’ he yelled, ‘it’s Chuck. Listen how loud I can make my TVgo.’ I haven’t had the chance to check yet but I feel fairly sure that ifyou look in The Guinness Book of Records to see who has theloudest voice in the world, you will find it’s good old Chuck. And boy,does he have a lot of friends. So many that by the time he hadfinished calling them all, it was time for another game of squash.Eventually, I had to call reception to ask if they would ring the manand ask him to go to sleep. I heard him pick up the phone.

‘Hello,’ he bellowed. ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then he put the phone down,knocked on my door and whispered at the sort of level that cansplinter wood: ‘Sorry, buddy.’ Then the sun rose and in the sameway that it always seems to find the crack between the sun visors inyour car, it found the crack in my curtains and bored a line of pure,superheated radiation straight into my left retina, so I had to get outof the minibar and back into the Aga that was my bed.

Understandably then, the next day I was not in the mood for smalltalk about Jean-Claude Van bloody Damme. ‘Come on, ’I persisted.‘What has theEU ever done for me?’

My companion, a fervent Europhile, explained that she would nothave been able to go to an Irish university because she had beeneducated in England and, as a result, could not speak Irish. ‘Well,’ Isaid, ‘that’s very wonderful but how does it help me?’

She had to agree it didn’t but, unfazed, went on to explain thatbecause of the EU leather shoes must now sport an EU-approvedsymbol showing they are made of leather.

Hmmm. I’m not sure that this, on its own, is quite enough to justifythe two-centre, three-tier government with its staff of 35,000 people,especially as most of us are clever enough to recognise thedifference between something that came from the bottom of a cowand something that came from the bottom of a Saudi oil well. ‘No,’ Isaid. ‘This leather thing is going nowhere. You must do better.’

She told me that because of the EU designer clothes were nowcheaper in the UK, but since I’m not big on Prada I don’t care. Thenshe said that were it not for the council of ministers there would bemore air pollution. Wrong subject, I’m afraid. Twenty minutes later,after I had finished explaining precisely how little damage is beingdone to the world by man and his machines, she moved on.

Apparently, if I go to a country where no British embassy isoperating (neither of us could think of one) and got myself arrestedfor drug smuggling, I could call for help from any EU member statewhich was operating a mission there.

So, if you get banged up in Kabul for producing heroin – and this,believe me, is very unlikely – and it turns out that the Foreign Officehas been forced out for some reason, you can go to the Swedes.

And that, after an hour of soul-searching, was all she could comeup with. Cheap, bureaucratic leather shoes and help from theVikings if things go pear-shaped in some Third World hellhole.

That night I checked into a hotel where the chambermaids werehosting a 24-hour Hoover race. My room was on a tricky little cornerwhere most of them crashed into the skirting board.

This, I suspect, is why the EU doesn’t really work. None of thepeople who run it is getting any sleep.

Sunday 8 July 2001

A Weekend in Paris, the City of DaylightRobberyLast Sunday a Connex Third World commuter train broke down, dueto the wrong type of government, just outside Sevenoaks in Kent.This forced both inbound and outbound Eurostar trains onto asingle track, causing delays of up to five hours.

Predictably, the passengers were said to be ‘disgusted’. Those incattle class said that all they’d been offered was a free glass ofwater, while those in first class said they couldn’t get any sleepbecause the carriage doors made too much noise.

It all sounds very grim. And very strange. Because I was on one ofthe trains and I never even noticed there was a problem. Sure, weleft Waterloo at a brisk saunter and rattled past Sevenoaks at astately crawl but this is what I’d been expecting. Time and again weare told that Eurostar doesn’t work and that the tunnel is full ofrabies and German tanks.

That’s why I’ve always chosen to go to Paris in a car, in a plane, ona boat; on my hands and knees if necessary. Anything rather thanthe train which could give me a disease and catch fire 20,000 feetbeneath Dogger Bank.

However, let’s just stop and think for a moment. It is never reportedthat every motorist driving to Paris is stopped by the constabularyand made to stand naked in a freezing cell while they raid hispension plan to pay for the inevitable speeding fine. Nor do youever read about flights being diverted to Bournemouth due to thewrong type of air.

This happened to me last autumn. My car was at Gatwick. I hadlanded at Hurn. So what did I do? Get on a train and go straight to

landed at Hurn. So what did I do? Get on a train and go straight toLondon, or get on a bus for a three-hour trip round the M25 so Icould be reunited with my wheels? The answer, as far as I know, isstill parked at Gatwick in car park G, row 5.

The result is that last Sunday I chose to go to Paris on Eurostar.The first-class ticket cost me FFr2,000 so it’s more expensive thanflying. But from the centre of London to the centre of Paris it is tenminutes faster than going in a Boeing.

You can smoke, too, so who cares that the carriage doors open asthough they’ve been blown apart with Semtex and that the clankydrinks trolleys have square wheels?

However, I’m not sure that Paris was the right destination. It’s funny,isn’t it, that Haussmann’s low-rise, starburst city of lurve is alwaysfirst choice for a romantic weekend break and yet, when you standback for a moment, you have to wonder why.

Obviously, the metropolitan pomp is extraordinary and the wholeplace does give good fountain, but in recent years it has becomedirty, down-at-heel, more rude than ever and yet somehow lessinteresting. On the dark and broody Left Bank, left-wing Jean-PaulSartre types have been driven away by high rents and thearistocracy has retired to its clubs on Rue St Honoré.

You are left with a vast and chewy middle class and at this time ofyear even that is busy sunning itself on the beaches of Biarritz.Paris is therefore like the elephant house without the elephants. It’sbereft of anything. Except perhaps a sense of menace; a sensethat, really, you should put your wallet down the front of yourunderpants.

It’s not as bad as Detroit, obviously, where you wouldn’t get 30yards before someone put a hole in your head so they might steal

yards before someone put a hole in your head so they might stealyour toenails. Or Puerto Rico where the hotel guards said it wouldbe best if I stayed at the bar. But it’s bad all right. At night, Paris haseyes.

Carjacking, for so long the preserve of Muscovite gangsters andurban Durbanites, is now an everyday occurrence. Elsewhere inEurope the weapons of the needy are a sponge and a bucket ofwater, but at the traffic lights in France it’s a pistol and an instructionto get out.

The French, displaying a Latin leaning to the right, blameimmigration, saying Paris was fine before it was swamped with halfof Macedonia. But the fact is that I felt tempted to steal somethingthe first time I sat down at a pavement café and ordered a couple ofbeers.

This was in Montparnasse, which is nothing special, and yet the billwas ruinously preposterous. I paid ten bleeding quid for two poxy1664s and half a dozen olives. Then there was my laundry bill in thehotel: £180. It would have been cheaper to buy a washing machine.

And we haven’t even got to the food which, I was assured, wouldrestore my faith. Even the worst-looking dive, they said, wouldconjure up a taste sensation. Everyone in France, apparently, isborn to cook.

No, they’re not. The first time I ate out I was struck, for the first timeever, with loose stool syndrome; the second, my lobster had beennuked (they probably got it from Mururoa atoll); and the third, I got aplate of what tasted like a smoked inner tube.

So, all I can say is that if you’re looking for a dirty weekend of rumpypumpy, forget Paris. They’ll nick your condoms. And make you eatthem later. At £500 a pop.

them later. At £500 a pop.

What I would do is get on the train and do what you always want todo on the plane – turn left. That way, you’ll end up in Bruges whereyou can walk round quite safely in a hat made of money, gorgeyourself silly on pig’s trotter sausage and have a very, very nicetime.

Sunday 15 July 2001

It’s a Work of Art, and It was Built on OurBacksI suppose that in the world of jet travel we have all seen somenoteworthy modern architecture. The arch at La De´fense in Paris.The new Reichstag building in Berlin. The Transamerica Tower inSan Francisco. And yes, even the Millennium Dome.

But no matter what you’ve seen or where you’ve been, theGuggenheim Museum in Bilbao is enough to blow your underwearclean into next week. Some say this vast, curling edifice resemblesa ship; others say it’s a big steel fish; while those of an architecturalbent argue that it echoes Bilbao’s maritime past while drawing onthe town’s more recent flirtation with heavy industry.

The truth, however, is that it sits in the city like the Taj Mahal wouldsit in Barnsley, dominating the sightlines and your thoughtprocesses with equal aplomb. It’s there at the end of every street,and when it isn’t it’s etched on your mind.

You can be halfway through a bowl of paella half a mile away andyou are drawn, as if by some invisible force, to get up from yourtable for yet another look. It’s the aurora borealis. It’s a moonlightrainbow. It’s a meteor shower and a tornado and the mostmagnificent African sunset all rolled into one. It is the most amazingthing I have ever seen. And I have seen Kristin Scott Thomas in thenude. So, obviously, I had to go inside.

On the top floor was an exhibition of frocks by Giorgio Armani which,I’m told, was a runaway success when it was shown at theGuggenheim in NewYork recently. This, of course, means nothingbecause Americans will turn up in great numbers to watch a tractormove.

Unfortunately I can get excited by a frock only when there issomeone in it so I went to the middle floor, where there was adisplay of television sets. But since I’ve seen this sort of thing inDixons, I carried on going to the ground floor, where there was alarge queue to go in a triangular maze.

This is always going to be a problem with buildings of this nature,whether they be the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Dome. Whatthe hell can you put inside that is going to be more astonishing thanthe building itself?

The most successful exhibition ever staged in Bilbao was amotorcycle show. But then bikers tend not to be terribly interested inaesthetics. Most would walk over a lake of Renaissance art if therewas a Harley-Davidson on the other side. I, on the other hand, wasglad to be back outside again, to sit in a bar and gawp at thisdisjointed tower of titanium and golden limestone.

I knew that three architects had been invited to pitch for its design.Each was paid $10,000 and allowed three weeks and one site visitto come up with something. And I knew that the contract had beenawarded to a Canadian called Frank Gehry. But who on earth paidfor it?

The Guggenheims made a fortune from mining, but then they lost abig chunk of it when the South American mines they owned werenationalised.

Today the family is still a huge patron of the arts but it likes a bit ofpublic money as well. And it got public money in Bilbao to the tuneof $100 million.

And that begs another question. How can Bilbao, which is one of thegreyest, most unfortunate and ugly towns in the whole world,

possibly have come up with $100 million for a museum? Towns ofthis nature in Britain can’t even afford to empty a dustbin let alonebuild a modern-day version of Westminster Abbey down by the riverfront.

This being Spain, answers are not easy to come by. Everyone has arecorded telephone message saying that they’re at lunch and willbe back some time in September. If by some miracle you do findsomeone who is at their desk, they say they can’t be bothered tofind out.

So let’s consider the facts. Bilbao is a Basque town and the moneywas raised by the PNV, a Basque nationalist party. That’s fine, butwhat is the PNV doing with access to $100 million?

Idon’t know – but I do know this: in 1999, and that’s the most recentyear for which figures are available, it cost the British taxpayer £3.5billion to be a member of the European Union. That equates to £60for every man, woman and child. And that sum, plus a bit more, wentto Spain to help with the modernisation programme.

Well now, Spain already is modern. Dentists use electricity. Thehedges are neat and low-voltage lighting has replaced that halo ofthe Third World – the fluorescent tube. Sure, they may tell you thatthey’ve ‘only’ been a democracy for 25 years. But 25 years is a longtime. Nobody ever says that he has ‘only’ been married for 25years.

What are they doing with all the cash? Well, I can’t find a link but itmay well be that, actually, you and I paid for the Guggenheim. Andthat makes it as British as Gibraltar.

The Dome may have been an unmitigated disaster but it seemsthat, unwittingly, we’ve managed to create the greatest building the

world has ever seen. Go there, but for two reasons don’t go inside.One: it’s not worth it; and two: they’ll charge you, even thoughyou’ve paid already.

Sunday 22 July 2001

They Speak the Language of Death inBasque CountryBy the time you read this I’ll be in Menorca, you’ll be in Turkey, yourneighbours will be in Florida and a man in a mask will be in yoursitting room, helping himself to your television set.

Still, it could be worse. You could have gone to Biarritz. It was theworld’s first seaside resort and is to be found on the Atlantic coastjust before western France makes a right-angled turn and becomesSpain. I love it there, and not just for the vast beach with those man-sized Atlantic rollers.

I love the town, which blends Napoleonic splendour with peelingVictorian modesty and I love the rolling hinterland, too, where youfind the caves from which European man first stumbled 10,000years ago. I love the cooking which tumbled into town fromneighbouring Gascony. I love everything so much that I don’t evenmind the crummy weather that blights these parts from time to time.

Anyway, when it rains it’s only a half-hour drive to Spain, where youcan watch ballet dancers stab bulls. Then at night you can go to thetown of San Sebastian, which has more bars per head of populationthan any other city in the world. Wellington’s troops got so blotto,they burnt the whole place to the ground.

So what’s wrong with it? Well, unfortunately, this is Basque countryand that means it’s twinned with a place that’s up the Shining Path,along the Gaza Strip, past the Tamil’s tiger, round Pol’s Pot andbeyond the Falls Road.

We tend to think of ETA, the Basque separatists, as a low-rentterrorist organisation which uses bicycle bombs because cars aretoo pricey. They’re news in brief, at best.

too pricey. They’re news in brief, at best.

Not when you’re there, they’re not. They raise money not byjangling tins in far-away Chicago but by making everyone, up to andincluding international footballers, pay a revolutionary tax. And ifyou don’t pay, they blow up your car, your house, your wife, yourbudgerigar, your bar and everyone in it.

That’s why I left the place behind and have come to Menorca.

Since the recent troubles began they have killed nearly 900 peopleand as a result there’s a policeman on every street corner dressedup like Robocop, wielding a heavy machine-gun and sweating thesweat of a man who is very, very frightened indeed.

I saw one poor copper, a kid, probably eighteen years old, and Iswear to God that if I had snuck up behind him and said ‘Boo’, he’dhave had a heart attack. I’d only been there an hour before one ofthem was shot.

I’d only been there a day before I came round the corner to findmyself at the scene of a car bomb. Now I’ve seen most things thatcan be done to a car, but it was quite a shock to see how far youcan make one go, and in how many different directions, if you put abit of dynamite under the driver’s seat.

Needless to say, the driver in question had been turned into aveneer.

So that was two dead in a day and not even the Palestinians are atthat level.

Yet ETA is still news in brief – unless British tourists are delayedflying home by the odd bomb, as in Malaga on Thursday.

How can this be? Spain is our next-door neighbour but one and yet,so far as I can tell, nobody in Britain has the first clue what theseBasques actually want.

To try and find out, I spoke to Karmelo Landa, who is theirequivalent of Gerry Adams and who quoted extensively from thebook entitled What To Say When You’re the Spokesman for aBunch of Terrorists. It was all democratic this and political that and Imust confess I got rather cross with him.

The fact is that the Basque region, apart from a short spell duringthe Spanish Civil War, has never been an autonomous state. Theymay be descended directly from those early cave dwellers but theRomans, the Vandals and the Visigoths passed them by. Sincethen, they claim to have discovered America, which is unlikely, andthat they built the Armada, which sank. They also maintain that theygave the world the word ‘silhouette’. But this isn’t exactly up therewith putting a man on the moon, is it?

The Basques have the same defining characteristics as the Welsh.The Welsh can sing. The Basques have big earlobes. The Welshare good at moving stones. The Basques are all blood group O.And both have a militant core that wants autonomy primarily toprotect a language that doesn’t really work.

Welsh is burdened by an almost complete lack of vowels but it’snothing compared with the language of the Basque. Even the nameof it is unpronounceable. Let me give you an example: the literaltranslation of ‘I am writing’ is ‘In the act of writing, doing. You haveme’. And to make matters worse, it seems that the only three lettersin the Basque alphabet are X, K and X again. It’s so hard that prettywell everyone, even in the Basque hill towns, prefers to useSpanish, despite the lisping and spitting.

It’s madness. I can see why someone would fight for their freedom,god or country. But it’s hard to see how a language can be worth alife. And nigh on impossible to see how Basque could be worth 900lives.

Sunday 29 July 2001

Reason Takes a Bath in the SwimmingPoolThe ninth week of my trip around Europe brings me to Menorca,where there is a harsh, laser edge to the shadows. The heat sits oneverything out here with such oppressive force that even thecrickets can’t be bothered to sing. It should be relaxing.

Except it’s not, because of course in the garden of the house I amborrowing there is a swimming pool which, after voicemail, is thesingle most exasperating rung on the ladder of human achievement.

It’s funny, isn’t it: nobody ever dreams of putting a pond in hisgarden. Ponds are for those who think it’s safe to let their childrenplay with electricity. Ponds are for pond life.

Barely a week goes by without a garden pond killing a toddlersomewhere. But take away the lilies and the dragonflies, add a littledepth for added danger, dye the whole thing vivid turquoise andsuddenly we perceive the whole wretched thing to be as harmlessas Lego.

The problem, however, with the pool out here in Menorca is not thatit might kill the children. It’s that it might kill me. There’s a cover, yousee, which adheres to the first rule of anything to do with swimmingpools: it doesn’t work. Not unless you dive underneath a woodenplatform in the deep end and unjam the mechanism, a process thattakes ten minutes – exactly nine minutes and fifty seconds longerthan Mr Marlboro Man can hold his breath.

I’ve been down this road before. Five years ago I rented a house inthe south of France which, it said in the blurb, came with a pool. Andindeed it did. But on the second day of our holiday we awoke to findthat half the water had escaped.

that half the water had escaped.

Keen to preserve what was left, I donned my Inspector Clouseauscuba suit and ascertained that the only possible way for water toleave the pool was via a big hole in the bottom. Unaware that thishad something to do with filtration, I covered it with a large dinnerplate and went to the beach.

Certainly, my brave and swift actions meant that no more waterleaked away, but unfortunately they also meant that the pump wassucking on nothing for eight straight hours. People say the resultantexplosion could be heard in Stuttgart.

I vowed there and then, and again this morning, that I would neverhave a pool at home, but unfortunately my wife really wants one.

‘Why?’ I wailed. ‘You’re Manx. You’re supposed to have taste.’

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘but I was born in Surrey.’

There are other problems with installing a turquoise slash in ourgarden, chief among which is the fact that we live in ChippingNorton, widely regarded as the coldest town in England. Even whenthe whole country is basking under a ridge of pressure so high thateveryone’s eardrums are imploding, the only pool I ever want toimmerse myself in is a nice hot bath.

But my wife is adamant and haughtily dismisses my suggestion of askip filled with rainwater and slightly upended to create a deep end.I even suggested that we could heat it from below with a brazier, butshe hit me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper. So I havebeen doing some research and it seems you can put in achlorinated child-killer for £20,000 or so. That is less than I thought,but it’s not enough.

There is a level of one-upmanship in pooldom that would leave aCheshire car dealer breathless with envy. First of all there is theissue of temperature. Your pool must be warmer than anyone else’sin The Close. But to win this game you end up with something that’shot enough to boil a lobster.

Then there’s music. Moby must be piped into underwater speakersfor reasons that I have yet to understand completely.

Let’s not forget depth. A friend of mine called Jumbo recentlyinstalled a pool at his home on Hayling Island only to discover thatit’s impossible, when you’re so close to the sea, to dig down morethan 4 feet. He has ended up with a pool that has two shallow ends,connected in the middle with a shallow bit. You don’t swim in it somuch as stroll around looking like Jesus. It’s social death.

The only way round it, I’m told, is to employ a pool man of suchdevastating beauty that nobody notices they are gathered roundwhat is basically the most expensive puddle in Portsmouth.

But let’s say that you have got a pool that is deeper than LakeTahoe, hot enough to fry the underwater speakers, attended to byHugh Grant and served by a pool house which is a full-scale modelof the Taj Mahal. Then what?

Well, then you’re going to need a pool cleaner. The best I ever sawwas a huge spidery thing that waved its arms around, sucking upanything that drifted past. Its owner was very proud, and then veryangry, when a friend of mine fed it a burger and it sank. ‘What didyou do that for?’ he bellowed. ‘Well,’ said my friend, ‘it serves youright for buying a cleaner that only eats leaves. How was I supposedto know it was vegetarian?’

So swimming pools can be summed up thus: they take all yourmoney, all your sense of reason, all your time, and if you leave them

money, all your sense of reason, all your time, and if you leave themalone for a moment they take your children as well.

Sunday 5 August 2001

You Can Fly an Awfully Long Way onPatienceI knew, of course, that a charter flight from some low-rent Spanishholiday resort to London’s Stansted airport was never in a millionyears going to take off on time.

To make matters worse it had a scheduled departure of 11.30 p.m.which meant it would have had an entire day to get out of sync. Andsure enough, when we arrived at the airport we were told it was stillin Essex.

‘So what’s the problem this time?’ I inquired with the world-wearyresignedness of someone who has heard it all before. ‘Technicalproblems? Wrong type of air? Leaves in the sky?’ ‘No,’ said the rep,‘the captain got stuck in traffic on the M11.’

I see. Because the hopeless git did not set off for work on time, Inow have to spend four hours in an overheated, understaffeddeparture lounge with seventy children under eight, none of whomis mine. Great.

I don’t know who you are, captain, but I sincerely hope you have apenchant for Thai ladyboys and that your colleagues find out. I amnot a vindictive man but it is my fervent wish that from now to theend of time all your itches are unreachable. And that someonewrites something obscene in weedkiller on your front lawn.

To keep us all happy and to help to while away the hours, we wereassured that free soft drinks and snacks would be provided.

They were not. What was provided was a styrofoam cup of hot. Hotwhat, I’m not sure. It could have been tea or it could have beenoxtail soup. The snack was a sandwich filled with a piece of pink that

oxtail soup. The snack was a sandwich filled with a piece of pink thatwas thinner than the paintwork on a 1979 Lancia. Then I discoveredthat the batteries in my Game Boy were flat.

To my left, a fat family clad from head to foot in Adidas sportswearhad managed to find some chips. An amazing achievement this,since all the shops were shut. But you could put people like that onthe fourth moon of Jupiter and within fifteen minutes they would finda sack of King Edwards and a deep-fat fryer.

To my right there was a much thinner family, also clad in Adidassportswear, attempting to get some sleep and using theirManchester United football shirts as pillows. Sleeping was difficultbecause every five minutes King Juan Carlos himself came on theTannoy to explain very loudly that by royal decree smoking isprohibited.

Then it got more difficult still because a team of heroically lazySpanish cleaners finally woke up from their afternoon siesta anddecided that the floor needed a damn good polish, using asquadron of machines that were designed by the Russians in the1950s and had been in service with the Angolan air force eversince.

By 1.30 a.m. I was reduced to reading the instructions on the fireextinguishers and contemplating starting a food fight. I decidedagainst it because the bread in the free sandwiches was hardenough to kill and the filling was too light to fly properly. It would justsort of float.

At 1.45 a.m. we were asked by the king again to board buses whichwould take us to the plane. Yippee. At long last, Captain James T.Berk had arrived. We were on our way.

Oh no we weren’t. After fifteen minutes of standing on the stationarybus, we were forced to endure 50 minutes of sitting on thestationary plane where there was no air conditioning and, worsestill, no explanation or apology from the flight deck.

Only after we had become airborne and fallen asleep did CaptainFool come on the PA system to explain what had gone wrong. It hadbeen too hot, he said, for the plane to take off and, as a result,some of the bags had been removed from the hold.

Oh, that’s marvellous. So you get us home four hours late, youseparate us from our luggage, you never say sorry and then youcome up with the worst excuse I have ever heard. How can it havebeen too hot, you imbecile? Because of your shoddy timekeeping, itwas three o’clock in the bloody morning.

The thing is, though, that I (mostly) kept my temper because I knew Icould come home, write this and therefore make his life asmiserable as he had made mine.

What staggered me was the patience of my fellow passengers.They never complained. They quietly sat at the airport eating theirmeat veneer. They quietly stood on the bus, sweating. They didn’teven squeal when the stewardesses poured boiling water into theirlaps, told barefaced lies about the luggage being on board andgenerally treated us as if we were a nuisance in the smooth runningof their aeroplane.

The problem is that we are used to all this, and more. We expectthe tiny bit of road that isn’t jammed solid to be festooned withspeed cameras. We expect the train to be late and the Tube toexplode. We know that the plane will make an unscheduled stop inBogotá and that if we complain we’ll be taken off by the police,arrested and shot.

Naturally, we expect a charter flight to get us back to Stansted fourhours after everyone else because, of course, this particular airlineis the sponsor of the spectacularly hopeless Minardi Formula Oneteam which, last time I looked, was just finishing the 1983 FrenchGrand Prix.


What I Missed on My Hols: EverydayMadnessAnd so, after two months on the Continent, I’m back in Britain tryingto decide if I have missed anything. What I normally miss is theBritish weather. A dose of hot sunshine may be pleasant for a weekor two, but soon you begin to tire of sunscreen and having a rednose. You find yourself hunting down bits of shade and not wantingto do any work because it’s far too sweaty.

After four weeks I found myself lying awake at night dreaming ofbeing cold. We have no idea how lucky we are in this countryhaving weather that we don’t notice; weather that doesn’t slap us inthe face every time we set foot outside the door.

But what concerns me more than the weather is what I’ve missed inthe news. We all assume when we come back from a spell abroadthat the country will have changed out of all recognition. There willhave been fourteen days of developments about which we will haveno knowledge.

New fashions will have come and gone. New political parties willhave formed, new bands will have been created and we won’t beable to talk about any of it at dinner parties. So what exactly have Imissed in the past nine weeks?

I missed Bill Clinton standing in for Cliff Richard at Wimbledon, and Imissed the joyous spectacle of Jeffrey Archer going down, but then Ididn’t really because the verdict was extensively covered in theSpanish newspapers where, for some extraordinary reason, he waslikened to a modern-day Oscar Wilde. Well yes, apart from beingconspicuously un-gay and even more conspicuously unable towrite.

Also, I missed Madonna’s deification. When I left she was a fadingDetroit pop star but I’ve come back to find that she is sharing asocial plinth with a fat blonde hairdresser from Wales who seems tohave become famous after admitting to a fondness for blinking. Theforeign newspapers missed that one. Perhaps they were divertedwith the problems in the Middle East.

It seems that I also missed a hugely funny television programmeabout child pornography, although I’m told that most of the peoplewho found it offensive missed it too.

Then there has been this business with Michael Portillo. When I lefthe was going to be leader of the Conservative Party. But now theclever money seems to be on some bloke who I’ve never heard of.Is he good at blinking as well? One has to hope not or he mightmiss himself.

I was about to deduce that I had missed nothing when my eye wascaught by the New Labour exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery inLondon. What on earth were they exhibiting? Perhaps they hadtaken a leaf out of Tracey Emin’s book. Perhaps this is where all theNational Health Service beds went. And all the bricks that shouldhave been used to build playcentres for the kiddies. As well as thelast vestiges of our pride and dignity.

Have you ever heard of anything quite so preposterous as anexhibition, in a world-renowned art gallery, that is named after theruling political party? A party that received fewer votes than the girlwho likes blinking.

But, that said, I would love more than anything to do my own NewLabour exhibition. ‘This is the egg that hit Mr Prescott and here’sthe shirt worn by Tony when he had the sweat problem. And if you

follow me now past the Women’s Institute zone, we can see PeterMandelson’s mortgage-application form, lovingly entwined withReinaldo’s visa-waiver document.’

In the restaurant I would have lots of mugs, lots of mad cows andlots of free fish for the Spanish visitors. In the play zone I wouldhave hundreds of savage, rabid foxes and a helter-skelter. Ifanyone said that wasn’t very New Labour, I would tell them it was aspiral staircase for disabled people. Inside I would have Ron Daviesin the lavatories, Keith Vaz on the till and audio guides recorded byMichael Martin. And when it all went horribly wrong I would blame MoMowlam.

Keen to find out what had actually been exhibited at the gallery andif I was on the right track, I dug out an old copy of Time Out and wassomewhat bewildered to find it had singled out a video exhibit byLiane Lang. Who she is, I have no idea. Another Big Brothercontestant perhaps?

My bewilderment turned to bafflement when I read what the videocontains: a clay hand manipulates a woman’s groin fringed withspiky black hair. Devoid of sexiness, the image, we are assured, isperplexing. You’re damn right it’s perplexing. And it gets worse.Rebecca Warren, it says here, uses clay to a more playful andseductive effect. Painted with a wash of pink, a woman opens herlegs to the lascivious attentions of what might be a grey dog.

Astonished, I telephoned the gallery and asked what any of this hadto do with Tony Blair and his third way. ‘Oh, nothing,’ said the girl.‘It’s just that the exhibition opened on election day and we sort ofthought the New Labour name fitted.’ Actually, it does.

It’s a load of metropolitan claptrap. I may have missed the exhibition,which closes today, but to be honest I didn’t miss it at all.

Rule the Waves? These Days We’re Lostat SeaMy childhood memories of Britain’s maritime achievements centrearound endless black-and-white television pictures of shrivelled uplittle men with faces like Furball XL5 stumbling off their batteredyachts in Southampton having sailed round the world backwards.

Francis Chichester, Chay Blyth, Robin Knox Johnston. Grainypictures of Cape Horn. And Raymond Baxter reminding us all that,once again, the noble island nation has tamed the savage ferocityof those southern oceans. Trafalgar, Jutland. The Armada etc. etc.etc. Britannia rules the waves. Always has, always will. The end.

Now, however, we find that pretty well every sailing record in thebook is held by the French. They’ve been across the Atlantic fasterthan anyone else, round the world faster than anyone else and,while plucky Ellen MacArthur grabbed all the headlines by pluckilycoming second in the recent Vendée Globe race, the event wasactually won by a Frog. Same as it was the year before. And theyear before that.

Some say the problem is sponsorship, some argue that sailing inBritain is drowning in its own gin and tonic. But the simple fact isthat, these days, the only time a British sailor gets on the news iswhen his boat sinks. We had that bloke who turned turtle offAustralia and survived by eating himself. Then there’s the RoyalNavy which, these days, would struggle to gain control of a puddle.And let’s not forget Pete Goss, whose Team Phillips boat, built to goround the world, didn’t even get round Land’s End before the endcame off.

Now I should make it perfectly clear at this point that I’m not a sailor.

I tried it just the once on what was basically an aquatic Rover 90. Itwas captained by an enthusiastic Hampshire type who kept sayingwe were really ‘knocking on’, but I doubted this, since I was beingovertaken by my cigarette smoke.

You could have steered that bloody thing through a hurricane and itwould still have only done four knots. And that’s another thing. Whydo people lose the ability to speak English as soon as they cast offthe spring? Why is speed knots and knots reefers? And why, everytime you settle back for a real reefer, do you have to get up again?To get the painters in.

Furthermore, even the most mild-mannered man acts like he’s gotthe painters in as soon as he grabs the wheel (helm). Why? We’reat sea, for heaven’s sake. If I don’t respond immediately to yourcommands or pull a sheet instead of a halyard, it really won’t matter.A two-second delay will not cause us to crash.

In fact, come to think of it, I know all there is to know about sailing,i.e. that it means spending the day at 45 degrees while movingaround very slowly and being shouted at.

Understandably, then, I was a trifle reluctant when I was invited toBrest, to join the captain and crew of Cap Gemini, a £3-millionFrench-built monster – the biggest, fastest trimaran the world hasever seen.

Launched just last month, it is hoped it will get round the world in 60days and, to put that in perspective, an American nuclearsubmarine just made the same trip in 83 days. This is one really fastboat.

But it’s the sheer size of the thing which draws the crowds. Finding itin a port is a bit like finding a haystack in a needle. You just look for

the mast which stretches up past the other masts, through thetroposphere and way into the magnetosphere. This boat doesn’tneed satellite navigation. You just climb up that mast and have alook.

In fact, Cap Gemini doesn’t really have anything. To keep the weightdown, the whole boat, even the sail, is made from carbon fibre andso, having gone to all that trouble and expense, they weren’t goingto undo it with internal luxuries. The ten meat machines who sail itare expected to use their clothes for mattresses. And it doesn’t evenhave a lavatory.

We set off and, for five glorious minutes, I think I saw the appeal ofthis sailing business. The sun came out, the wind picked up and themighty yacht set off into the Bay of Biscay like a scalded cock.Perched on one of the three hulls, 20 feet clear of the iron-flat sea, Icould scarcely believe my eyes as the speedometer climbed past30, 35 and then 40 knots. Using nothing but the wind for power, wewere doing nearly 50 miles per hour. This was astonishing. Had Ibeen an American, I would have made whooping noises.

But then the wind died down again and we turned for home. Exceptof course we didn’t. This being a sailing boat we had to endlesslytack back up the estuary, turning what should have been a 25-kilometre breeze into a 3-hour, 50-kilometre, aimless, walking-paceslog.

There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to smoke and,no matter where I went, some fantastically good-looking hunk ofsun-bleached muscle trod on me and then shouted because I wasin its way. This, I think, is why the British have largely given up withsailing.

Apart from a few crashing bores in blazers, the rest of us haverealised that, for getting round the world these days, you can’t beat

realised that, for getting round the world these days, you can’t beatan Airbus. Which is also French. Dammit.

Sunday 2 September 2001

Why Can’t We Do Big or Beautiful AnyMore?With the England football team on the crest of a wave andunemployment at an all-time low, it should be a good time to sitback, put on some Elgar and feel warmly fuzzy about being British.

Concorde is coming back, too, and soon it will be tearing across theAtlantic twice a day to remind Johnny Yank that, once upon a time,we were capable of unbelievable genius. Even NASA’s mostrespected engineers have admitted to me, in private, that designingand building a supersonic airliner was a greater technologicalchallenge than putting a man on the moon.

So it’s wonderful that once again Heathrow will rumble and shudderunder the onslaught of those massive Olympus jets. However, it’salso a little sad because you can bet your last cornflake that theBritish won’t have anything to do with man’s next great landmark.

The problem is that the twenty Concordes cost £1.5 billion, whichback then was an astronomical fortune. Even today it would buy twoMillennium Domes. Yet despite this, the last five to roll off theproduction lines were sold for just FFr1 each.

The whole project was driven by Tony Benn, a man who was alsoresponsible for getting the hovercraft out of Cockerell’s shed andinto the Channel. In addition, he helped to create ICL, Britain’sanswer to America’s IBM. When he was postmaster-general, hepushed for the Post Office Tower which, for twenty or more years,was London’s tallest building.

Denis Healey once said that Benn ‘came close to destroying theLabour Party as a force in twentieth-century British politics’. And Ibet he had few friends at the Treasury either. But my God, he knew

bet he had few friends at the Treasury either. But my God, he knewhow to make everyone feel good about being British.

Today, however, the government doesn’t give. It simply counts thecost. Everything is measured in terms of how many baby incubatorsit could have bought or how many teachers it might have paid for.

You just know that if Norwich city council were to build a beautifulfountain in the city centre, the local newspaper would find somebereaved mother to come out from behind the Kleenex to say themoney should have been spent on speed humps instead.

Part of the problem with the Dome was that instead of making amonument that would stand for all of time, they tried to make it ashort-term business proposition whose basic function was to pay foritself. And while the London Eye has been a resounding success,you know that its foundations are rooted in someone’s profit andloss account.

Maybe this is a fundamental problem with capitalism. Maybe thepeople of a country don’t get blanketed in the warm glow of nationalpride unless they have a socialist at the helm. Someone like Benn.Or the man who dreamt up those Soviet May Day parades.Certainly the communist cities I’ve visited do give good monument.

However, to disprove this theory there is the Grande Arche de laDéfense in the not very communist city of Paris. Had they filled themiddle with offices, the rental income would have been boostedtenfold, but then they wouldn’t have ended up with something soutterly magnificent. And what about the very non-communist USNavy? There is no practical reason on earth why it needs fourteencity-sized aircraft carriers. They exist primarily to instil in the folksback home a sense of security and national pride.

So I’m left facing the inescapable conclusion that the lack of will tobuild something worthwhile, something beautiful, something brilliant,is a uniquely British problem. Maybe we can’t feel a sense of pridein ourselves because we don’t know who or what we are any more.

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end ofyour street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither innor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in winebars. We are not a colonial power but we still have acommonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello!celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longerunited. We are muddled.

And this must surely be the only country in the world that sees itsnational flag as a symbol of oppression. So if you can’t be seen aspatriotic for fear of being labelled a racist, you aren’t going to bedesperately inclined to build something for the good of the nation.Not that you know what the nation actually is or means any more.

Our football team may be on its way to the World Cup finals but wedon’t even have a national stadium in which it can play homegames.

Concorde is back in the air – but not because the great white birdmakes us all feel good. It’s back because the accountants at BritishAirways have turned the white elephant into a dirty great cash cow.

To combat this disease, I would like to see a fund set up that doesnothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows,towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuffdesigned solely to make us go ‘wow’. I even have a name for thisfund. We could call it the lottery.


Learn from Your Kids and Chill Out Ibiza-StyleYou may have seen various Ibiza-style compilation music albumsadvertised in the middle of fairly highbrow television programmesrecently. And you may have thought that this was as inappropriateas advertising knickers in the middle of a football match. You arewatching a documentary about insects. You are intelligent. The onlyIbiza soundtrack that you’re interested in is the cicadas, not themega-decibel noise coming out of the clubs.

I mean, take an album called The Chillout Session which, accordingto the blurb on the cover, is a laid-back mix of blissful beats andchilled-out house featuring Jakatta, Leftfield, William Orbit, GrooveArmada, Underworld and Bent. Dotcom computerised e-music forthe e-generation. Or, to put it another way, rubbish.

And rightly so. It has always been the job of modern music to annoyparents. When I used to watch Top of the Pops in the early 1970smy father’s face would adopt the look of a man who’d just beenstabbed in the back of the neck with a screwdriver. There wasbewilderment and some real pain, too, especially during ‘BallroomBlitz’.

This was a man who spoke the language of pop music with the élanwith which I speak French. He used the definite articleindiscriminately, talking about the Queen and the T Rex. He referredto the Rod Stewart as ‘that man who sings while he’s on thelavatory’, and once said of the Billy Idol: ‘You’d have thought if hewas going on television, he’d have put a shirt on.’

He honestly and truthfully could not see any difference at allbetween Rick Wakeman and Rick Derringer. I could never believe it,

but to his ears, Mick Fleetwood and Mick Jagger were one and thesame.

And yet twenty years down the line, I found myself in the same boat,unable to tell the difference between the house and the garage.Techno, hip-hop, rap. It was all the same to me. A collection ofangry-looking young men with their trousers on back to front, urgingus to go out and kill a pig.

This is undoubtedly why Radio 2 became the world’s most listened-to station. Thanks to an appealing blend of Terry Wogan and theDoobie Brothers, it was a little haven of peace for thefortysomething music lover who was terrified of the noises beingmade on Radio 1.

However, if you listen exclusively to Radio 2, you are isolated fromthe fast-moving world of modern music. You become stuck in a NeilYoung Groundhog Day, endlessly buying After the Gold Rush onCD and mini disc.

You don’t watch MTV. You don’t read the NME. You don’t see Top ofthe Pops any more. So, how do you know when there’s some newmusic out there that you would like?

The record companies can’t put flyers under the windscreen wipersof every Volvo in the land, so that’s why these Ibiza Chillout recordsare being advertised in the middle of programmes you like to watch.It’s because they feature the type of music you would like to hear.

You may not have heard of William Orbit but you will know his songwell because it’s Barber’s Adagio for Strings. And while you may beunfamiliar with Groove Armada, you’ll be able to hum along becauseyou’ve heard their tune on and on in those slow-motion end-of-championship slots on Grandstand.

Listening to this music is like having a length of ermine pulledthrough your head. If honey could make a noise, this is what itwould sound like. It becomes the perfect soundtrack for your spagbol and Chianti supper party.

Of course, you’re not going to listen to it in the same way that youlistened to Steve Miller ’s Fly Like an Eagle in 1976. Back then,listening to an album was a job in itself whereas this e-music isacoustic wallpaper, something you have on while you do somethingelse. In our language, it’s Jean-Michel Jarre meets Mike Oldfield,without the joss sticks and the vinyl crackle.

Moby is particularly good. Buy I Like to Score tomorrow morningand you’ll never listen to Supertramp again. You’ll retune your carstereo to Radio 1 and you’ll put up with five hours of pig killing forfive minutes of the whale song.

And you’ll start to hear other bands that you like. Radiohead.Toploader. Coldplay. Dido. David Gray. Stereophonics. You mayhave heard the names over the past few years and you may haveassumed, as I did, that they banged garden furniture into computersand recorded road drills for the benefit of your children, but no.You’ll hear melodies that will cause you to hum along. And none ofthem will encourage you to stab a policeman.

I’ve taken to buying their albums and it’s wonderful not having tostand at the counter in a record shop being called ‘man’ by thespiky salesman because I want The Yes Album on CD.

But if middle-aged people are able to discuss the latest mega-mixfrom Ibiza and the vocal range of Joe Washbourne from Toploaderthen our children will have nowhere to go. We’ll be in Ibiza giving itlarge and, to rebel, they’ll be on a Hoseasons canal boat singingsongs from The Sound of Music.

Going to the Dentist in the Teeth of AllReasonLeft to its own devices, an elephant would never die. It has nonatural enemies. It is not prone to riding a motorcycle. It has themetabolic rate of granite. So, to ensure that the world was noteventually overrun by herds of immortal two-tonners, nature put atime bomb in its mouth: weak teeth. They are replaced with newones every ten years, but when the sixth set has worn out, that’s it.Game over for Nellie.

Human beings are different. The enamel that coats our teeth is notonly the hardest substance in our bodies but also one of thetoughest and most resilient concoctions found anywhere on planetEarth.

Think about it. The oldest evidence of humanoid existence wasfound three years ago just outside Johannesburg. Named LittleFoot, nothing much remains. It’s just a sort of fossil, except for theteeth which loom out of the rock as fresh and as shiny as they werewhen the poor creature lived, 3.6 million years ago.

We see this all the time. Archaeologists are forever pulling deadpriests out of fields in Lincolnshire and declaring that they diedduring the Reformation after being boiled in acid, burnt, hung,drawn, quartered, crushed and then quartered again for goodmeasure. Every bone is always smashed and rotten and yet theteeth still gleam.

So why, then, has the government recently announced that it will beallocating £35 million to help eradicate tooth decay? Why did it saythat poor children can now get free toothbrushes on the NationalHealth Service? Well, it’s because the health minister who dreamt

up these schemes is called Hazel Blears. This would make her awoman. And that would make her completely obsessed with otherpeople’s teeth.

When I was a single man I went to the dentist only once, when I hadtoothache. He said all my teeth would have to be filled except two,which would need root canals. Then, after he had filled my face withneedles and Novocaine, he asked whether I would like the workdone privately or on the NHS.

‘Oor’s huh diffence?’ I tried to say.

‘Well,’ he replied with a sneer, ‘if you have it done privately, thefillings will match your teeth. And if you have it done on MrsThatcher, they won’t.’

I had seen Mrs T’s teeth so, poor as I was, I went private.

For the next fifteen years I didn’t go to the dentist at all and it madenot the slightest bit of difference. I was not visited by the Itosis familyand their troublesome son, Hal. On the rare occasions when Imanaged to get girls back to my flat, they did not keel over and diewhen I moved in for the first kiss. Some didn’t faint.

Then along came my wife, who spends 60 per cent of the family’sGDP on electric toothbrushes and 40 per cent of her morningsawing away with floss. Also, she sends me off for a dental check-upevery six months.

Why do I need to have a man poke about in my mouth with asharpened screwdriver when I know that my teeth will last about50,000 years longer than the rest of me?

Nobody dies of tooth decay. It’s always some other part of the bodythat gives up, but despite this we don’t go to the doctor twice a year

demanding a full service. Come on, doc, there’s nothing obviouslywrong but I want you to examine every single bit of me minutely. Iwant X-rays and then I want to see your hygienist, who will spray jetsof ice-cold grit up my backside.

No, we go to the doctor only when something is wrong and that’show it should be at the dentist.

Vanity is the problem. Nobody will be able to see if your spleen hasa growth on it the size of a cabbage, but when your molars gobrown and gingivitis takes your gums, that’s a woman’s idea of hellon earth.

There are four different types of teeth. There are canines which areused for tearing off lumps of meat. There are incisors which areused for cutting it. There are premolars for crushing it. And thereare American teeth which are used for appearing in Hello!magazine.

You do not achieve American teeth with toothpaste and regularflossing. Nor will you have the full Victoria Beckham after a courseof bleaching at the dentist. No, to achieve teeth which are waybetter than anything nature ever intended, what you need is millionsof pounds.

Small wonder that in a football wall these days, the vain andeffeminate players put their hands over their mouths rather thantheir testicles.

There are other drawbacks, too. I’m told that you will emerge fromthe operation not only looking different but sounding like a differentperson as well. And there’s no way of knowing before the dentiststarts work with his chisel whether you’ll emerge from the ordeal asStephen Hawking or Sue Ellen.

All we do know is that people with American gnashers all lookexactly the same. If you are horribly injured in an accident, theywon’t be able to identify you from your teeth because they will havecome from the same box in Beverly Hills as everyone else’s. Thinkabout the consequences: you may spend the rest of time lyingbeneath a gravestone which tells passers-by that you were VictoriaBeckham.


Sea Duel with the Fastest Migrants in theWestI’ve often thought as I’ve watched the police prise yet anotherfrightened little brown man with a moustache from the underside ofa Eurostar train: ‘How bad must life have been at home for that tohave been better?’

According to the union that represents the immigration service, theISU, there are now 1.2 million illegal immigrants living in Britain, andwe know full well, of course, how they got here. They were usheredinto the tunnel and into the backs of trucks by the French police.

However, what I’ve always wanted to know is: how the hell are theygetting into Europe in the first place? Where’s the leak?

Well, last week, I found it. Every month, thousands of immigrantsare being brought by the Albanian mafia in fast boats across the 50-mile-wide Strait of Otranto from Albania into southern Italy.

And what are the Italian police doing to stop them? Well, I had agood look round and, so far as I can tell, the most important thingthey have done so far is buy themselves some really coolsunglasses. It’s like a Cutler and Gross convention.

And you should see their patrol boats. Forget superyacht alley inAntibes. Forget the Class One racers. The fastest, sleekestmachines I’ve ever seen are backed up to the harbour wall inOtranto, rocking as the mighty diesels are revved.

So, the police look good and they can go really fast. Butunfortunately they can’t go fast enough.

You see, the profits from smuggling people are simply mind-boggling. The going rate for the one-way trip is $800 (£540) perperson, and with 40 people to a boat, that works out at $32,000(about £21,600) a go. And a few $32,000 trips buys you an awful lotof horsepower.

To combat this, the police are now allowed to keep the boats theycatch and use them against the smugglers. Which means the mafiahave to build, or steal, faster boats to stay ahead.

Welcome, then, to the biggest aquatic race track the world has everseen. A race track where the victors win the chance to spend therest of their days above a chip shop in Bradford, and the losers endup dead.

Here’s the problem. As soon as a mafia boat sets off from Albania itis picked up by Italian radar stations, which direct police boatstowards the target. But even if they can go fast enough to catch up,then what?

You can’t simply ask the driver to pull over, because he won’t. He’sgoing hell for leather and won’t stop even when he reaches thebeach. You might be able to block him but then – and this happensa lot – he’ll lob the cargo of Kurds over the side, and once they’vedrowned turn and run for the lawlessness of home.

There’s only one solution and that’s to point your 80-mph boat atthe mafia’s 90-mph boat, and do what your forefathers did whenthey were Romans. Ram it.

This is spectacularly dangerous. Last year, fourteen immigrantswere killed when they were hit by a police boat, and earlier this year,when the mafia used similar tactics to evade capture, threepolicemen died.

And really, is the risk worth it? I mean, the poor passengers onthese boats sold everything they had for their one shot at freedom,so what chance do they have when they’re sent back after 30 daysin a holding station? They’ll be penniless and homeless in a countrywhere, according to the Italian police, there simply is no sense ofright and wrong. Just rich and poor.

And besides, the mafia is now running a marketing campaignpinched, I think, from Ryanair. If you get caught on your first trip,they give you two more rides. But there are strings attached – well,chains, actually. If you make it, you’ll owe them a debt; a debt thatwill never be repaid by hanging around on Regent Street washingwindscreens.

You’re going to have to get into some serious stealing and robbingto keep your benefactors happy.

They’re going to put your sister on the streets and your daughtersare going to be burnt with cigarettes, whipped and put on theinternet.

So what’s to be done? We can’t let them all in, but by the sametoken it goes beyond the bounds of human decency to keep themall out.

David Blunkett spoke last week about relaxing the laws onimmigrants, allowing people with a special skill to get a work permitin Britain. Great, but the people coming over on those boats are notteachers and computer programmers. All they can do is strip downan AK47 and milk a goat.

The danger is all they’re going to learn while they’re over here ishow to remove a Panasonic stereo from the dashboard of a FordOrion.

To stop this happening, we must go after the people who put thesepoor souls in debt even before they get here. We must go after themafia. Of course, 4,500 British troops have been in Macedonia formonths, trying to do just that. But last week, as Tony Blair spokeabout his dream of waging an international war against terror andinjustice, the soldiers packed their bags and came home.

And now the mafia will be rubbing its hands with glee, knowing thatpretty soon half of Afghanistan is going to roll up at the Albanianseaside…

Sunday 7 October 2001

My Verdict? Juries are As Guilty As Hell…This week various civil-liberty types have been running around asthough they’re on fire because new government proposals wouldstrip a defendant of his or her automatic right to trial by jury. Theplans say that if you’re charged with a medium-level offence suchas theft or assault or doing 41 mph, then you would be tried by ajudge and two magistrates.

What’s wrong with that? Whenever I meet someone new I take in thelittle details, the hair, the shoes, the eyes, and within five secondshave decided whether I like them or not. In normal everyday life itdoesn’t matter that nine times out of ten I’m wrong. But it wouldmatter a very great deal if I were to make one of these lightningdecisions while serving on a jury.

The defence team could argue until they were blue in the face thattheir client was in Morocco on the day of the crime. They couldshow me tickets proving that he was and wheel out DavidAttenborough and Michael Palin as character witnesses. But I’msorry, if I didn’t like the look of the defendant’s trousers then he’dbetter get used to the idea of communal showers for a while.

I know people, people with bright eyes and clean hair, who havedone exactly the same sort of thing while on jury service. They’vetold me afterwards that they didn’t listen to a word that was saidbecause it was obvious, from the moment the defendant walked in,that he was as guilty as sin: ‘You could tell just by looking at him. Hehad a beard and everything.’

Furthermore, I know people who shouldn’t be allowed anywherenear a courtroom because, quite frankly, the inkwells would be morecapable of making a rational decision.

I heard a woman on a radio quiz the other day say the two countiesthat border Devon are ‘Yorkshire and the Falkland Islands’. And thecountry is full of people who regularly, and quite deliberately, watchsoap operas. I once met a girl who thought there were two moonsand that mosquitoes could burrow through walls. As the law stands,she could have been selected to try Ernest Saunders.

John Wadham, director of Liberty, the civil-liberties group, said theabolition of juries amounted to an attack on fairness in the criminaljustice system. But what, pray, is fair about being tried by someonewho thinks that insects can operate Black & Decker two-speedhammer drills?

And what’s fair about asking me to sit on one of those fraud trialsthat go on for twelve months? Well, it won’t happen. If I’m asked, Ishall simply misbehave in front of the judge on the first daybecause, believe me, doing a month in clink for contempt beats thehell out of sitting on a school bench for a year listening to men inwigs arguing about tax in a language I don’t understand.

Unless a fraud case is clear-cut, by which I mean the white maledefendant tried to cash a cheque in the name of Mrs Nbongo, thenno normal person on earth could possibly be expected to reach afair and reasonable decision.

Think about it. A Cambridge-educated genius spends fifteen yearsperpetrating a stunning piece of tax avoidance. Then some of thebest legal brains in the country conclude that it was, in fact,evasion. And who decides which side is right? A bunch of peoplefrom McDonald’s and Kwik-Fit. You may as well roll the dice.

Surely, therefore, it must be a good idea to let judges decide forthemselves whether a jury, even in the crown court, wouldnecessarily be a good thing.

For sure there are some judges who can’t get through the daywithout dropping a clanger. Just this week, someone who had beensent to jail by magistrates for three months was released by a judgewho said, and I’m quoting now: ‘Prison doesn’t do anyone anygood.’ But even a buffoon as idiotic as this would know how manymoons there are.

Let’s be honest. To qualify as a judge you must have displayed, atsome point in your life, an above-average level of staying power.Whereas I couldn’t get even halfway through my libel lectures atjournalism college before I was filled with an uncontrollable urge tofall asleep.

All things considered, I think the use of judges and magistrates willmake these new district courts fairer, faster and cheaper. But thereare some aspects to the proposals that must have been dreamt upby one of the more stupid audiences on Who Wants to be aMillionaire?

I can’t see the point of mix ‘n’ matching the tone of the judge’s skinto that of the defendant, and I really can’t understand the new ideason so-called plea bargaining. The proposal is that the sooner youplead guilty the more lenient your sentence will be. Come runningout of the jeweller’s shouting ‘It was me, it was me’ and they’ll let youoff with a light birching. But plead not guilty to a judge who thinksyou are and you’ll be showering with other men for the rest of time.

Still, all this is likely to become law, so on that basis I’d like to saythat I’m going to London tomorrow morning and will be driving onthe M40, between junctions eight and one, at speeds in excess of95 mph.


The More We’re Told the Less We KnowEvery day we are bombarded with surveys that tell us what thenation is thinking. These help shape government and corporatepolicy. Yet the people who are being questioned – you and me –have no clue what we’re talking about.

We drown these days under the weight of information coming intoour homes. We have the internet and rolling television news. We inBritain read more papers than any other European country. But themore we’re told, the less we know.

Think about it. When you are twenty you know everything. But themore you travel, and the more you learn and the more you read,the more you realise that, actually, the more you know, the moreyou know nothing.

Take the war in Kosovo. As far as I could tell, it was an absurdventure. A whole bunch of tribes had been knocking eight bells outof one another since time began, when all of a sudden, NATOdecided, for no obvious reason, that the Serbs needed a damngood bombing.

Confident that I’d got it all worked out, I voiced this opinion to anAmerican called James Rubin. He’d actually worked with MadeleineAlbright in the Balkans and very probably had Slobodan’s numberprogrammed into his mobile. But what the hell, I’d had a few winesand I was ready for a scrap.

And what a scrap it turned out to be. He may have had all theinformation but I’d had all the Chablis. So he destroyed me. Hepeeled my argument like an orange. In boxing terms, it was likeLennox Lewis going head to head with Charlotte Church.

Now we spool forward a few weeks to another dinner party where Iused Rubin’s argument on the man to my left. Unfortunately, he wasan American banker who, it turned out, had brokered some sort ofdeal between the telephone system in Serbia and the Pope. Onceagain I found myself in the Charlotte Church role, reeling from thetwin hammer blows of reason and knowledge.

So, if you walk up to me in the street now and ask whether I thinkthe current campaign in Afghanistan is a good or a bad thing, I shallhave to say that I don’t know.

My gut feeling is that America should divert its considerableresources to setting up a Palestinian state, but since these viewscoincide almost exactly with those that are expressed in theGuardian every day, it’s almost certain I’m wrong.

How will I ever know, when all we get are soundbites and speculationand surveys that tell us that 107 per cent of the world think TonyBlair is God? And 0 per cent think he’s a buffoon on a massive anddangerous ego trip. But then did you know that 72 per cent of allstatistics are made up on the spur of the moment? Including thatone.

So, on that basis, what do we think about the euro? The surveyssuggest that 80 per cent or so are against, with about 18 per cent infavour. Which means that only 2 per cent of the population areclever enough to realise they simply don’t know.

Last year I thought it was as stupid as trying to build the roof of thehouse before you’d built the walls. Then I spent the entire summertravelling around Europe from the Polish border with Germany tothe northwestern tip of Spain; from Brest in Brittany to the tip of Italy.And I decided that we have a lot more to learn from our Europeanneighbours than they do from us. Good coffee, for instance. And

better pornography in hotel bedrooms.

‘So,’ said a girl I had dinner with last weekend, ‘you’d let Poland in?’‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d let all the eastern European states in?’ ‘Yes.’‘Including Albania?’ ‘Well, all of them except Albania,’ I said. ‘AndMacedonia?’ ‘And Macedonia,’ I conceded, realising that after sixmonths on a fact-finding tour of the Continent, absorbing knowledgelike a sponge, I’d come home with a half-formed thought.

It turns out, however, that before a state can join the union, it mustcomply with a set of rules and terms so complicated that they run toseventeen volumes. And now I know that what I know is that I knownothing at all.

Someone out there knows, but he’s only ever given three secondson the evening news to explain. So he comes up with a soundbitethat nourishes our quest for knowledge with the effectiveness of aMcNugget.

I have a similar problem with the environment. I read more scientificstudies than most and I’ve always thought it’s just a bunch ofanticapitalist nonsense to suggest that we’re all going to suffocateby next Wednesday. But last week I sat in that thick brown smog thathas turned the south of France from the Côte d’Azur into the Côtede Brun and thought: hang on a minute. This has not been createdby all the sailing boats.

By doing some research and giving it some thought, I’d turned afirmly held conviction into one side of an intercranial debate.

The inescapable conclusion to all this is that if you have all the factsto hand, you will see there are two sides to every argument and thatboth sides are right. So, you can only have an opinion if you do nothave all the facts to hand. This certainly explains the Guardian.

Without a PR Protector, I’m Just AnotherFat GitWell, I’m back from holiday pink and perky, thank you very much.But then, of course, you knew that, because while I was away theSunday Mirror ran a picture of me on the beach in Barbados.

The accompanying story suggested that I was celebrating my new£1-million contract with the BBC, that I was staying at the world-famous Sandy Lane hotel which costs £8,000 a night, and that Ihave become fat. ‘Pot Gear’ said the rather clever headline.

It was all jolly interesting except my contract is not worth £1 million, Iwas not staying at the Sandy Lane and it doesn’t cost £8,000 anight. Furthermore, they completely missed the big story. One of thebiggest stories ever, in fact. The reason why I’m so fat is becauseI’m pregnant.

Well, that’s what happens when you get shafted isn’t it? Theproblem here, of course, is that the photographer never actuallycame along and asked why I was there, in which case I would havetold him the joyful news about my amazing new baby. He just hid in abush with a long tom lens.

Do I mind? No, not really. It’s quite flattering to think my stomach ismore important than a dead Queen Mother and a war in the MiddleEast. But what interests me is that the next day another newspaperran some pictures of Gary Lineker on a beach in Barbados. Fine,except that instead of describing him as a jug-eared midget, theysaid he was a lovely, adorable, happy-clappy family man.

Why? We both have the same employer. We were both with ourchildren, on the same island, at the same time. Neither of us isknown to the people who wrote the stories. So why am I a rich, fat

known to the people who wrote the stories. So why am I a rich, fatgit squandering licence-fee payers’ money at the world’s worsthotel, while Lineker is a churchwarden whose tireless work forcharity has resulted in thousands of orphaned children beingbrought back from the dead, and ended several small wars.

Well, I’ve made some calls and it seems that Gary employs a publicrelations person – a former editor of the Sun no less – to createand mould and manage press coverage. While I don’t.

And this, I think, is the root cause of all the recent aggravation withNaomi Campbell and the Mirror, the stories about Les Dennis andAmand a Holden, and whoever it was went off with the captain ofBlackburn Rovers. No wait. One of them was a drug addict, weren’tthey? I can’t remember.

The point is that pretty well all celebs live behind a PR net curtainand enjoy the diffused light it creates. They’re used to the OK!-typefeature where they’re seen at home, cutting up a freshly baked nutloaf with some shiny apples on the coffee table. They only need rolla 2p piece into a lifeboat-charity box at a pub and they’re painted inthe papers the next day as a sort of Paul Getty, but better lookingand with nicer breasts.

So when a paper catches them with a line of coke up theirschnozzers or a dead builder in the swimming pool, it’s like they’vebeen thrust through the curtain and are facing the real world for thefirst time. It’s nasty.

PR is nasty, too, but unfortunately it works. Not only for celebritiesbut also for politicians. It alone put a completely unprincipled man inNo. 10, and even more amazingly it kept him there.

All those useless meddlers on the front bench have been on PRcourses to make them more eloquent and better able to deal with

courses to make them more eloquent and better able to deal withthe press. Well, all except one, of course, and as a result he’sprojected as a fat, pugilistic twerp with two Jags.

Big business uses it, too. Twice now I’ve attacked the VauxhallVectra and twice the enormous General Motors PR division hasmanaged to spin the story round so that I emerged as the villain ofthe piece. Again. And he’s fat, you know.

The thing is though that PR is not desperately expensive. Pressinquiries can be handled for maybe £500 a month, whereas for£2,000 you can expect to be given your own personal halo andsome wings. So why, I wonder, do we not use it in everyday life?

Night after night, my children go to bed angry with me for onereason or another. Usually because I’ve made them go to bed. Sowhy don’t I get a PR girl to do it for me: ‘Your daddy wants you tostay up all night and eat chocolate, but Mummy says it’s bedtime.’

Then when I inadvertently put all the crockery in the tumble dryer –it happens – my PR person could bury the bad news on a day whenone of the kids has fallen off a swing and cut her knee.

Late for a meeting? Ordered 2 million paperclips by mistake?Goosed the boss’s wife at a Christmas party? All of these things canbe spun to your advantage if you get yourself your own personalAlastair Campbell.

I’m certainly going to get a PR man when my new baby is born.Because if I try to handle things myself, I’ll end up making a mess ofit. I can imagine the story in Hello! now: ‘Jeremy Clarkson invites usto his dirty house for the birth of his fourth hideous child.’


Why Have an Argument? Let’s Say It withFistsThis summer the Albert Hall in London will play host to an evening of‘ultimate fighting’. Described as an extreme test for mind and body,the participants are billed as modern-day Roman gladiators; exceptof course nobody gets eaten.

Ultimate fighting is an American import, naturally, and the idea isthat two men are locked in a metal cage where they knock eightbells out of each other using whatever discipline happens to behandiest at the time – kick boxing, kung fu, wrestling, punching,judo. The only things which are not allowed are eye-gouging, andanything involving the groin or the throat. It does not say anythingabout teeth, though, so who knows – maybe someone will geteaten.

Predictably, every wishy-washy liberal is up in arms, with DerekWyatt, the Labour MP, being quoted as saying: ‘We have beencampaigning against foxhunting, bearbaiting and cockfighting, andthis is the human equivalent.’

Well now, Derek, that’s not strictly true, is it? Ultimate fighters arenot sitting at home with Mrs Fox and the babies, Foxy and Woxy,when a bunch of snarling dogs come bursting through the frontdoor. Nobody is forcing them into the cage. And they are not kidsfrom sink estates either. There are three British fighters; one has adegree in electronics from Kent University.

Even so, a spokesman for the British Medical Association said thatit’s a ghastly sport and that the point is to inflict injury on anopponent, which is wrong. No it isn’t. If a man, of his own free will,wishes to get into a ring and spend half an hour being kicked and

possibly eaten by another man, then what business is that of yours,mine or Derek Wyatt’s?

I must say, at this juncture, that I don’t like fighting. I prefer passiveresistance and, if that doesn’t work, active fleeing. Once a friendand I donned boxing gloves ‘for a bit of a laugh’ and pranced roundeach other making snarly faces. Then he hit me in the ear and Isimply could not believe how much it hurt. ‘Ow,’ I said, in a ratherunmanly way.

Then there was the time in Greece when a swarthy fishermanpunched me in the face. So why didn’t I hit him back? Well, this ishard to do when you are lying on your back in a dead faint.

Of course, the argument goes that war–war is the preserve of theintellectually stunted whereas the intellectually lofty prefer jaw–jaw.But consider this: I could have jawed with Stavros for hours and hestill would have hit me.

Only last night, in the pub, I found myself in the middle of a hugeargument. I was suggesting that the Israelis really had gone madthis time and that those shots of the tanks in Jenin were no differentfrom the shots of German tanks in Warsaw. My opponent, on theother hand, was sympathetic to Ariel Sharon and felt his actionswere justified in the face of endless Palestinian terrorism.

Neither of us was going to back down and so on we surged. Thewhole evening was swallowed by a tangle of twisted statistics,spurious historical fact and eventually, of course, that inevitabledescent into a spume-filled barrel of finger-poking personal abuse.

That’s the trouble with jaw–jaw. There can be no winner. You areforced to go on and on for ever. Or are you? Surely, if you want tomake an adversary see things your way – and that’s the whole point

– then why not simply punch him?

Speaking with the benefit of experience, I assure you that if it were achoice of backing down from a firmly held conviction or beingpunched in the face again, I would back down and whimper like adog.

I look sometimes at the politicians on Question Time, endlesslytrotting out statistics and five-year plans in a desperate bid to makethe adversary look like a fool. But why waste time? Let youropponent have his say, then hit him.

Certainly this would make the programme more interesting. Imagineit. Oliver Letwin delivers his piece on rising crime and how the Torieswill get more bobbies on the beat. Then Stephen Byers leaps overhis desk and kicks him. You would watch that, wouldn’t you? I would.

I would especially like to see Edward Heath biting Denis Healey.

John Prescott has had a stab at it, literally, and his left jab waswidely regarded as the most interesting feature of the last generalelection campaign.

Every week, at the moment, David Dimbleby winds up QuestionTime by inviting people to get in touch if they want to be in theaudience, but if we thought there was a chance of watching AnnWiddecombe pulling Glenda Jackson’s hair, the producers would bebeating willing spectators back with a stick.

There is something else, too. In the coming weeks Sharon andYasser Arafat may meet around a table and talk about what can bedone. They will conclude, after weeks and weeks, that there is nocommon ground and that in 50 years the Palestinians and theIsraelis will still be blowing one another to pieces.

So here’s a thought. Ariel and Yasser, one on one, in a cage at theAlbert Hall. The winner gets Jerusalem.


Speaking As a Father, I’ll Never be aMotherBob Geldof, perhaps the second most famous single dad in Britain,said last week that courts need to understand that not all men arebrutal, indifferent boors who are incapable of raising children.

An interesting point, especially as it came on the same day as theresult of an unusual custody battle in the Court of Appeal. Twoparents, one a high-flying City executive on £300,000 a year, theother a full-time parent who gave up work in the early days of themarriage to look after the kids.

So who won? The one who gave up work? The one who’s lookedafter them night and day for the past six years? Er, no. Even thoughit’s the mother who works, it’s the mother who won. The motheralways wins.

Well not always, according to the lone parent group Gingerbread. Itsays that one in ten single parents is a man and that, clearly, courtsdo sometimes award residency orders to fathers. I’m sure they do, ifthe wife is a drooling vegetable, but I’ve never heard of it.

Indeed, the only two single fathers I know had the job thrust uponthem because their wives died.

The fact of the matter is this. You, as a man, can put on your bestsuit and promise to read the children Harry Potter stories until dawnbut you’ll still lose. Even if your wife is sitting on the other side of thecourt wearing an ‘I love Myra Hindley’ T-shirt.

I think I know why. Last weekend I was entrusted with the task ofbeing a single father for two days, and frankly I’d have been betteroff doing underwater knitting. I made a complete hash of it. When

off doing underwater knitting. I made a complete hash of it. Whenmy wife arrived home on Sunday evening, way past the kids’bedtime, one child was bleeding profusely, one had left home andthe other was stuck up a tree.

Things started to go wrong just after lunch on Saturday. They mighthave gone wrong before that but since I was locked in the office,writing, with Led Zep II on the stereo, it’s hard to be sure.

Anyway, they went wrong after lunch because the dishwasher wasfull and I’m sorry, but I simply do not know how they work.

Oh, I can phase a DVD player so that six individual speakers can bemade to come on and go off in whichever room I choose, but wheredo you put the salt in a dishwasher? And will any form of powderdo? Well, not Coffee-mate, it turns out.

So what about washing machines? Nope. I can’t work those either,and I’ve never seen the point of a deep freeze since I only ever buywhat I want now. Send me into a supermarket and I will emerge tenminutes later with a packet of Smarties and a copy of GQ. Thenotion of buying a pizza for the children’s supper on Thursdaysimply wouldn’t enter my head. So the need for a deep freeze wouldnever arise.

Am I alone with this white-goods phobia? I don’t think so. And I knowfor sure that I’m not the only man in the world who cannot cope.

It isn’t that I won’t. I can’t. In the same way that I can’t turn back time,or make a dishwasher wash dishes. I therefore had to get the six-year-old to wipe the three-year-old’s bottom while I hid in a bush atthe bottom of the garden.

Saturday night, I made a mistake. I knew that I’d have to get up atdawn, so did I get an early night? Was I grown up and womanlyabout things? No. What I did, in a manly way, was stay up half the

about things? No. What I did, in a manly way, was stay up half thenight watching a television programme in which a group oftwentysomething people, who were marooned on a desert island,stood on a log.

And then it was Sunday and everyone was clamouring for Sundaylunch, just like Mum makes. Impossible. Mums know, you see, whatpotato does what. Jersey Royal. Placenta previa. Maris piper.Lactate. These are Mum words.

I, on the other hand, had no clue that ‘baking potatoes’ – well that’swhat it said on the label – could also be used for roasting. So wehad cauliflower instead and this, according to the seven-year-old,wasn’t quite the same.

Clearing up wasn’t quite the same either, because we didn’t bother.Partly because the dishwasher was still unemptied and partlybecause I had some fairly big plans to build a den that afternoon.And this, I think, is the fundamental difference between men andwomen parents.

Had it been me coming home on a Sunday evening after a weekendaway, I’d have been greeted by three children in their pyjamas,washed, scrubbed, deloused and with their homework done. Thepots would have been cleaned and the playroom would havegleamed like a pathology lab.

But I’d sort of glossed over the boring bits, or made a mess of them,and concentrated on teaching my six-year-old how to drive roundthe paddock on my new off-road go-kart, which is strictly not to beused by undersixteens. We’d built a tree house, done joy rides onthe old tractor, fallen over a lot, had a water fight and all fallen out.

To fathers, kids are fun. To mothers, they’re a responsibility. That’s

why it’s so important to have both. And it’s also why, if there’s nooption, courts have to side with the mums.


I’m Just Talk in’ ’Bout My Generation,BritneyHe was in a band famous for singing the line ‘Hope I die before I getold’. And now he has. John Entwistle may have been the quiet one,standing at the back while Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshendmade merry up front, but anyone who knows The Who knows hewas probably the only bassist in the world who could have kept upwith the manic Keith Moon, a man who rightly called himself ‘thebest Keith Moon-style drummer in the world’.

More than that, if you listen to ‘The Real Me’ on Quadrophenia,Entwistle uses the bass to create a melody. And he wrote ‘My Wife’,which is one of the best tracks on one of the best albums fromprobably the best band the world has ever seen.

The Who were about to embark on a tour of America. It would havebeen a sell-out. That’s because they were old, they’d been roundthe block and they knew what they were doing.

Every week Steve Wright hosts a round-table discussion on Radio 2where people as famous as Peter Stringfellow come in to talk aboutthe week’s new releases. Usually they’re absolute rubbish, anendless succession of teenagers reedily singing along to thebackground accompaniment of what sounds like a mobile-phonering tone.

Take Britney Spears as a prime example. Occasionally you hearwhat is obviously her own voice but for the most part it’s a computerinterpretation and, as a result, it sounds as if she’s coming at youvia an answering machine.

What about Mary J. Blige, about whom everyone seems to beraving. Frankly, I’d rather listen to a pneumatic drill. She’s nothing

raving. Frankly, I’d rather listen to a pneumatic drill. She’s nothingmore than a spelling mistake – it should be Mary J. Bilge.

However, the other day they played a song that was spellbinding. ‘Atlast,’ I thought, ‘here we have a new talent that can actually singand a new song that’s going somewhere.’ But I was wrong. Thesong was ‘Morning Dew’ – which is old – and the vocalist wasRobert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s gnarled and wizened front man.

Admitting that I prefer Plant to Mary J. Bilge is probably not allowedthese days, any more than it’s allowed to say that you prefer theConservative Party to His Tonyness. Certainly I know that I’m notallowed to say I went all the way to Wembley last week to see RogerWaters, the former Pink Floydist.

Indeed, lots of people asked where I was going on Wednesday nightand I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth. ‘I’m doing somecanvassing for the BNP in Burnley’ would have sounded better. ‘Ishall be downloading pornography from the internet’ or ‘I’m going tokill a fox’. Anything except saying I had tickets to see the anorak’sanorak.

But do you know, it was brilliant. Brilliant and properly loud. RickMason, as he was called in the Evening Standard’s glowing review,guested on ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, while SnowyWhite and Andy Fairweather-Low gave it their all on the six strings.There was even a drum solo.

Best of all, the songs were long, which meant they had time tobreathe. There was a beginning, a fifteen-minute crescendo in themiddle and a gradual descent to the end. What’s wrong with that?Who says songs have to be fast? – not Mozart, that’s for sure.

I’m sorry to bang on about the Slow Food movement again but mostpeople seem to think it’s a good idea. These guys have decided

people seem to think it’s a good idea. These guys have decidedthat Europe should be defined by long lunches and that theAmerican sandwich is nothing more than fuel for the devil.

They want to see towns full of coffee shops and squares full ofpeople passing the time of day with one another, not rushing off tomake another phone call. For them, Vesta is the Antichrist, and theyare getting enormous support. Most people like the idea of smallshops selling high-quality local produce, even if the queue stretchesout of the door and it takes a week to be served.

Yes, a supermarket is convenient and a Big Mac hits the spot whenyou’re in a hurry but why does music have to be this way? Why isthree minutes acceptable and twenty minutes pretentious? Would‘Stairway to Heaven’ be improved if they cut out the bustle in itshedgerow? I think not.

They say that radio stations prefer short songs and that Bo’ Rap, asBen Elton calls it, simply wouldn’t get any airplay if it were releasedtoday, but I can’t for the life of me work out why. Jimmy Young’s anold man these days and there’s no way he could get from his studioto the lavatory and back before Britney was over. He needs ascaramouche in his fandango if he’s to stand a chance.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to ourlives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’redoing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on analbum and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

I shall be doing just that today, however. If you’re in Chipping Nortonand you hear a strange noise, it’ll be me listening to ‘Won’t GetFooled Again’. And I won’t be, either. I like 1970s rock music and I’mnot ashamed to admit it.

Sunday 30 June 2002

Chin Up, My Little Angel – Winning is forLosersMy eldest daughter is not sleek. In fact, to be brutally honest shehas the aerodynamic properties of a bungalow and the coordinationof an American bombing raid.

She puts a huge effort into running. Her arms and legs flail aroundlike the Flying Scotsman’s pistons but despite this you need atheodolite to ascertain that she is actually moving forwards. She’s abit of a duffer at the school’s sports day.

Luckily, the school tries to operate a strict ‘no competition’ rule. Thegame starts, children exert energy and then the game finishes. Thisdoesn’t work terribly well with the 50-metre running race but oftenthere are never any winners and consequently there are never anylosers.

That’s the theory, but round the edge of the sports ground there’s acommunal picnic for parents. I had been asked to bring along apotato salad, which sounds simple enough but oh no. My potatosalad was going to be creamier and made with higher-qualitypotatoes than anyone else’s potato salad. This is why I got up at4.30 a.m. to make it.

Nobody was going to scoop my potato salad quietly into the bushes.Nobody was going to make joke retching noises behind my back. Iwas out there to win, to crush the competition like beetles.

My daughter did not understand. ‘You told me it doesn’t matter if Icome last in the race,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t,’ I replied.

‘So why,’ she pressed on, ‘are you trying to win a competition forpotato salads when there isn’t one?’

There bloody well was. And a competition for pasta salads, too. Andquiche. But all of these paled alongside the brownie wars.

Obviously, I chose the ones made by my wife but pretty soon I wassurrounded by a gaggle of women. ‘Try mine,’ they said. ‘Try mine.’It was just like the old days when schools had teams andcompetition and everyone crowded round shouting: ‘Pick me, pickme.’

I was never picked. I was always left at the back like the springonion in the bottom of the fridge: ‘Oh do we have to have Clarkson,sir? He’s useless.’

I was therefore determined that no brownie should be left out, butthis wasn’t enough. I was being pushed to decide, publicly, whosewas best: my wife’s with the creamy centre; the ones made withchocolate that had been specially imported from America; or theones with pecans floating in the middle. ‘They were all lovely,’ I said,sticking to the spirit of the day.

What spirit? What’s the point of protecting children from the horrorof failure on the sports pitch when their parents are all giving oneanother Chinese burns on the touchline? ‘My brownies are betterthan yours. Say it! Say it!’

I spoke last night to a man who bunged one of the teachers 50 quidat his daughter’s sports day, saying:

‘Look, if it’s close for first and second, you know what to do.’

The following year his daughter wrote to him saying: ‘Dear Dad,

please let me come where I come. Don’t try to bribe anyone.’ He didas asked and she came in second. But he wasn’t finished. He tookthe cup she won to the engravers and had it inscribed with a big‘1st’.

It’s not as if children don’t understand the concept of losing. Mineregularly have their stomachs blown open by aliens or their headskicked in by a Russian agent.

Of course, you could be good parents and turn up at sports daywith a bowl of tinned prunes. You could force your children to putthe PlayStation away and stick to Monopoly, which has no winnersand losers because nobody in the whole of human history has everhad the patience to finish a game.

Think about it. If your child has no understanding of failure, how willhe cope when he walks round the back of the bike sheds one day tofind his girlfriend in a passionate embrace with Miggins Major?There’ll be a bloodbath.

I don’t want my children to be unhappy. Ever. It broke my heartwhen, as predicted, Emily was last in her running race, thumpingacross the line like a buffalo. I couldn’t bear to watch her fightingback the tears of humiliation.

But what do you do? Well, why not teach them that losing is betterthan winning. Certainly, it’s impossible to make someone laugh ifyou’ve come home first. ‘So anyway, I got the deal, won the lotteryand woke up in bed the next day with Cameron Diaz and ClaudiaSchiffer.’ That’s nice but it’s not funny.

Furthermore, arranging your face when you win is impossible. Youhave to look proud but magnanimous and that’s hard even forDustin Hoffman. Michael Schumacher has been winning since hewas eight and he still can’t pull it off.

was eight and he still can’t pull it off.

All the funniest people in life are abject and total failures. There’sno such thing as a funny supermodel or a successful businessmanwho causes your sides to split every time he opens his mouth.

This is presumably why I felt a certain sense of pride as we trudgedhome from the sports day picnic. Everyone else was carrying emptybowls that had been licked clean. And me? Well, my bowl was stillfull of uneaten potato salad.

And I got a column out of it.

Sunday 7 July 2002

A Murderous Fox Has Made Me ShootDavid BeckhamLet’s be perfectly clear, shall we. The fox is not a little orange puppydog with doe eyes and a waggly tail. It’s a disease-ridden wolf withthe morals of a psychopath and the teeth of a great white shark.

Only last month a foxy-woxy broke into someone’s council houseand tried to eat a baby. I’m not joking. The poor child’s parentsfound their son’s face being mauled by one of these monsters as heslept on the sofa. And worse, I woke up last Tuesday to find a foxhad pulled Michael Owen’s head off. For fun.

Perhaps I should explain at this point that Michael Owen is one ofour new chickens, which were bought, and it pains me to say this,because stuff from the garden does taste better than stuff from theshop. Even to a man who can’t tell fish from cheese. If I could,they’d get rid of Mr Dyslexia and let me do the restaurant reviews aswell.

Certainly, I need the extra money to pay for my new-found organiclove affair. Pigeons have eaten all my sweet peas, scale insect hasinfested my tomatoes and now Michael Owen has been decapitated.

The children were hysterical and blamed me for not buying a securehenhouse. Obviously, I tried to convince them it was all Tony Blair ’sfault, but it was no good. So I had to spend £150 on a hut that lookslike Fort Knox, and a further £100 on a cage for the hens to runaround in.

The next morning we skipped down the garden like something out ofThe Railway Children. We knew Daddy would be on the train andthat everything would be rosy. But it wasn’t.

Sol Campbell was gone and finding out how this had happened didnot require much in the way of detective work. My garden lookedlike Stalag Luft III after Charles Bronson had been let loose with thegardening tools. One of the tunnels, I swear, ended up in Burtonupon Trent.

Even I was angry, so that afternoon I went to one of those spyshops in London and blew £350 on a pairof infrared night-visiongoggles. Unfortunately they were made in Russia, which is anotherway of saying: ‘Made badly by someone who’s drunk.’ So they don’twork very well.

At close range they’re fine, but at anything more than three or fourinches everything’s just a blur. Certainly, if this is the best Russiacan come up with now, we really didn’t have anything to worry aboutin the Cold War. Its tanks would have ended up in Turkey after its airforce had spent the night bombing the bejesus out of the Irish Sea.

However, if you concentrate hard you can just tell what’s an organiclife form and what’s a stone mushroom. And so, as the last vestigesof sunlight faded from the western horizon and the sky went black, Iwas to be found at my bedroom window with a 12-bore Beretta atmy side. Foxy-Woxy was going to die.

By one in the morning I’d nearly polished off a bottle of Brouilly andit was becoming increasingly hard to figure out what was what in thegreen world of infrared. But, yes, I was pretty sure there was a glowin the garden where before all had been dark.

I made a mental, if slightly drunken, calculation about where thiswas in relation to various trees, before putting the night-visiongoggles down, picking up the piece and firing.

The next morning my wife was distressed to find that her Scotts of

Stow chair had been blown to smithereens. And I’m afraid she couldnot be persuaded that through night-vision goggles it had lookedlike a fox. ‘Maybe through beer goggles,’ she said.

So the next night I was forced to stake out the garden sober. Thismeant I was still awake and alert at three when I noticed movementby the cage. I raised the gun and once again the serenity of the stillnight air was shattered as the weapon spat a hail of lead.

Over breakfast the next day there was a scream from down thegarden. ‘You f****** idiot. You’ve shot David Beckham.’ And I had. Itried hard to convince the children that she’d been savaged byvermin but it was no good. Luckily for the world’s police forces,there’s a big difference between a gunshot wound and a fox attack.

So now I’ve been banned from late-night sentry duty and I’m stuck. Ican’t put poison down because the dogs will eat it. And I can’t usethe dogs to get the fox because Mr Blair will be angry. What’s more,I can’t simply let nature take its course, because then all my henswill be killed and we’ll end up eating supermarket eggs and dying ofsalmonella, listeria or whatever it is they say will kill us this week.

This is what the metropolitan elite don’t understand: that thecountryside is a complicated place and that pretty soon they won’tbe able to buy organic nut loaf because a bunch of foxes will haveheld up the delivery truck and eaten its contents long before itreaches Hoxton.

The simple fact of the matter is this. I’ve tried to do my bit. I’ve triedto become organic. And all I have to show for it is a cockerel calledNicky Butt and a hen called David Seaman.

Sunday 14 July 2002

I Bring You News from the Edge of theUniverseFor me, there is no greater pleasure than lying on my back in themiddle of a deep, black desert, staring at the night sky. I simply lovehaving my mind boggled by the enormity of the numbers: the factwe’re screaming around the sun at 90 miles a second, and the sunis careering around the universe at a million miles a day.

Then there’s the notion that one of those stars up there could haveceased to exist a thousand years ago. Yet we’re still seeing its light.

Best of all, though, is that we’re about 3,000 light years from theedge of our galaxy – that’s 17,600,000,000,000,000 miles. And yet,on a clear night near Tucson once, I saw it. I actually saw it, and thatwas, please believe me, utterly breathtaking.

I therefore quite understand why people are drawn to the science ofastronomy. Certainly, I’m not surprised that after 40 years offumbling around, quite literally, in the dark, Britain’s astronomershave just handed over £80 million and joined forces with theEuropeans.

This means they now have access to the VLT (which stands for VeryLarge Telescope) at the ESO (which stands for European SouthernObservatory) in Chile. They will also help build the OWL (whichstands for OverWhelmingly Large telescope). And, boy, with allthese snappy acronyms, can’t you just tell this is basically a GO.Which stands for German Operation.

But let’s be honest, since Galileo disproved the Old Testament,astronomers have simply been dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s.Only last month, a meteorite shaved half an inch of ozone from theEarth’s atmosphere, and did they see it coming? Did they hell as

Earth’s atmosphere, and did they see it coming? Did they hell aslike.

Occasionally, they show us a photograph of some cosmic explosion.But bangs without the bang never seem to work somehow.Remember: in space, nobody can hear you scream.

What’s more, Ineed scale. I need something to be the size of a‘double-decker bus’ or a ‘football pitch’ before I get the point. Tellme that they’re burning 20,000 square kilometres of rainforestevery day and I won’t care. Tell me that they’re burning an area thesize of Wales and I still won’t care, but I’ll understand what you’re onabout.

I’m afraid then that a photograph of Alpha 48///bB1 blowing itself tosmithereens may be pretty, but getting access to the camera cost£80 million, and that seems excessive.

So, what about the question of extraterrestrial life?

Hollywood has convinced us that the night sky is full of alienswatching Holby City. But the reality is less romantic. The Setiorganisation, which searches for life in the universe, and which wasimmortalised by Jodie Foster’s film Contact, has spent £95 millionand seventeen years listening to the night skies. And it has foundabsolutely nothing.

However, let’s say it does. Let’s say that one day some computergeek actually picks up Corillian FM and let’s say we get a messageback to them along the lines of ‘Yoo hoo’.

Then what? At worst, the Corillians will beam themselves to Earthand eat all our family pets. ‘Hmm, Labrador – nice with watercress.’And at best, they will invite us over for drinks. Sounds good, buthow do you suppose we will get there?

The space shuttle can only do 17,500 mph, which is pretty fast inEarth terms, but for getting around the galaxy you may as well getout and walk. At 17,500 mph it would take 29 years for the shuttle toget out of our own solar system which, in cosmic terms, is about asfar as your front door.

To stand even the remotest chance of getting to wherever you’regoing before the crew dies, you need light speed. But here toothere’s a problem – the faster you go, the more time slows down.This is a scientific fact. I spend my life driving quickly, which is why Ihave a 1970s haircut.

So, if you could build something that did 186,000 miles a second,you would be out of the solar system in 6 hours. But you’d end up in1934.

Certainly, you’d arrive before the decision was made to send you.Worse, you’d arrive before the Corillians sent their invite and thiswould be social death.

Really, we know for a fact that humankind will never be able to travelat the speed of light because to do so would mean travellingbackwards in time. And this, in turn, means our world of today wouldbe full of people from the future. People would end up marryingtheir own grandchildren. It would be a mess.

Let’s summarise then. Astronomers spend their time lying on theirbacks looking at stars, but what’s the point? They can’t spotmeteorites that are on a collision course with Earth, and even if theycould, would we want to know? And if they do find life out there, wewill never be able to pop over and say ‘Hi’.

However, I fully support this £80-million investment. Because if asixteenth-century astronomer using a tiny telescope was able toprove the Bible wrong, think what damage could be inflicted by

prove the Bible wrong, think what damage could be inflicted bytoday’s astronomers with their VLTs and their OWLs on thenonsense science of astrology. Just £80 million to make a mockeryof Russell Grant – I’ll have some of that.

Sunday 21 July 2002

Go to the Big Top: It’s Better than BigBrotherWhat on earth are you all doing in the evening these days? I seetelevision viewing figures so I know you’re not in front of the box andI also know, because pubs are closing down at the rate of one aday, that you’re not in the boozer.

You can’t all have Sony PlayStations, so new technology isn’t theanswer, and obviously you aren’t at the theatre or there would beno need for Arts Council grants.

I thought perhaps you might all be out dancing but I read in thepapers last week that Cream, the rave club in Liverpool, has seenattendances quartered in the past ten years. Judging by the pitifulsales of books these days, you’re not curled up in front of the firereading.

In fact, if you add up the officially produced numbers of people whodo the usual stuff in the evening – drinking, cinema, theatre, eatingout, watching television, having sex and reading – you are left withan eerie conclusion. Every night twenty million people do absolutelynothing.

This week I became one of ‘the disappeared’. First of all I am stilllargely preoccupied with finding and murdering the fox that’s killingmy chickens and second I went to the circus. And neither, thanks tovarious animal rights organisations such as Born Free, the RSPCAand the Labour Party, are listed as officially recognised pastimes.

I’m dimly aware of having enjoyed traditional big-top circuses when Iwas little, apart from the clowns, who were downright scary, but I’malso dimly aware that such circuses were sort of outcast a couple ofyears ago when Mary Chipperfield was found guilty of being rude to

years ago when Mary Chipperfield was found guilty of being rude toa monkey.

I think this was probably sensible. I don’t normally agree with theRSPCA since I believe it is the duty of an animal to be on my plateat supper time but, that said, it’s hard to condone wanton cruelty.

And circuses were cruel. They had boxing kangaroos that wereplainly off their heads, and animal-rights activists were foreveropening up cages to find that the elephants had eaten their owndung and the tigers had bitten off their own tails. If they’d given afox some cannabis and told it to jump through hoops of fire, thatwould have been fine. Foxes deserve to be humiliated. But there’ssomething hideous about watching a lion, the king of the jungle,standing on one leg in a tutu.

There was something equally hideous about the ‘modern’ circuswhich replaced the Chipperfield original. This usually involved amessage of some kind and the message was usually aboutMargaret Thatcher: ‘Next up tonight, ladies and gentlemen, DaveSpart, who will use mime to explain the relationship between poll taxand apartheid.’

Not exactly family entertainment, and nor were the French andCanadian alternatives, which tended to feature dwarfs jugglingchainsaws.

It really did look, as the new millennium dawned, as if the circus hadbeen buried for good. Even the Dome, which was the biggest top ofthem all, reinforced that. So what was I doing in a tent last week?

I have no idea but I can tell you that, as live entertainment goes, itblew Darcy Bussell into the hedgerow and the Rolling Stones intothe middle of last week.

It was called Gifford’s Circus and it was held in a tent of a size thatwould be familiar to anyone who has camped out on Everest. Therewere no clowns in terrifying suits and they had not plundered theKalahari for animals. In fact the only four-legged entertainmentcame right at the end when a dog, belonging to someone in theaudience, sauntered into the ring and got its lipstick out. It was thatkind of show.

They had two jugglers from Ethiopia, who are apparently on theverge of taking a world record with their back-to-back routine. Andthey had Ralph and Celia, who came on in Victorian bathingcostumes and played what appeared to be a game of aerial twister.Did you know it was possible to stand on one leg with a womanbalanced on your nose? No, I didn’t either.

I don’t want to sound like some tweedy duffer who thinks televisionis the devil’s eye, but there was something uplifting about thissimple rural entertainment. Believe me, watching a man taking offhis trousers on a tightrope is amazing. I can’t even do it in abedroom without falling over. It was uplifting because it was so ‘upclose and personal’, and so small and so low-budget that you couldsee there was no computerised trickery.

Isn’t that what you want from entertainment – seeing people dothings you cannot do yourself? Big Brother? Give me the big topany day. If you are one of the twenty million dispossessed who stareat a wall every night because you can’t think of anything better todo, give the local circus a try. I think you’ll like it.

I was going to finish up at this point with something edgy and sharp.Something a little bit cool and now. But in the spirit of the piece I willleave you with this:

A goat goes into a jobcentre and asks in perfect English for some

work. The slightly amazed clerk has a look through his files andsays he could try the circus.

‘The circus?’ says the goat. ‘Why would the circus want abricklayer?’

Sunday 28 July 2002

The Nit-picking Twitchers Out to GroundBritainHouse prices are teetering on the edge of a bottomless hole andpretty soon anything with less than six or seven bedrooms will beworth less than its contents.

There ’sa very good reason for this. As far asI can tell, every singlehouse in Britain is on the flight path for one of the government’sproposed new airports. No village is exempt. No dale is deemed toobeautiful. No town is too small or inconsequential. Even Rugby,apparently, needs four runways, six terminals and 5,000 miles ofchain-link fencing. Nottingham, too, and Exeter – everywhere does.

The thinking behind this is worryingly simple. The government, freshfrom its success with the Millennium Dome and the River of Fire,has worked out that no people in Britain flew on commercial airlinesin 1901 and 180 million did in 2001. So, using the same sort ofmaths that brought us Gordon Brown’s shiny new overdraft, itreckons 500 million people will be landing and taking off from Britishairports in 2030.

That’s half the population of China. It’s twice the population ofAmerica. It’s everyone in Britain using a plane ten times a year. Andthat seems unlikely somehow.

Still, if you reckon half a billion people will be needing a runwaywithin 28 years, it’s easy to understand why every field in the land iscurrently earmarked as a potential airport.

This has led to a biblical outbreak of Nimbyism. Councils affected bythe proposal to build a massive new airport on the Kent marshestook the government to court last week, saying the extra noiseshould go to Gatwick. So now, we can be sure, the people of Sussex

should go to Gatwick. So now, we can be sure, the people of Sussexwill be fighting back.

This will turn Tunbridge Wells into the West Bank. It’ll be fatherversus son, mother versus daughter, neighbour versus neighbour.And it will all be completely pointless because, let me explain rightnow, there is no way in hell that an airport will ever be built on theMedway marshes.

First of all, since London swelled up to the size of Belgium, Kent isas inaccessible as the South Pole or Mars. Given the choice ofgoing on holiday via an airport in the middle of the Thames estuaryor staying at home and beating myself over the head with a brick, I’dstay at home.

Of course, they could get round this by building better road and raillinks but what they could never get round is the most fearsomeorganisation in the entire world. In a straight battle between this lotand Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden would end up killing himself toescape from the hounding. It can nit-pick a man to death from 400paces. It never gives up. Its members are terminators. Ladies andgentlemen, I give you… the Royal Society for the Protection ofBirds.

The twitchers have pointed out that the Medway marshes are hometo the country’s largest heronry and that is pretty much that. Asimple avocet would have done the trick but they’ve come up with awhole herd of herons so one thing’s for sure; there will be no Kentairport.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some environmental protestersin China who had wheeled out a dolphin to try to stop the massiveYangtze dam. And Chinese officials had got round the problem byshooting it.

But that will never happen here. The mere fact that we have thisconsultation shows how democratic we’ve become. Now everyonehas the chance to object. As a result, nothing will happen until theend of time. No matter where the government selects, there willalways be a slug or a beetle or a butterfly.

What we need at a time like this is someone who can machete theirway through the eco-twaddle. We need someone who can shovethe government’s projections back up Alistair Darling’s new holeczar. We need a realist at the helm. And I can think of nobody betterqualified than me.

Video conferencing and emails take up less time and involve lessrisk for businessmen than being chased across the Atlantic by heat-seeking missiles. So I can see, in the fullness of time, a dramatic fallin the demand for business travel.

However, there will be a significant increase in the number of peopletravelling for fun. And, as I said earlier, it won’t be fun if they have toset off from a mudflat on the Medway or a business park in Rugby.

You have to leave via London and – contrary to the claims made byStansted, which is in Bishop’s Stortford, or Gatwick, which is inBrighton – the capital has only one airport: Heathrow.

The government’s proposals seem to call for one new short runwaybut what good is that? Build six new long ones and be done with it.They will be able to handle the bigger planes that are coming.Heathrow is more accessible than any other airport in Britain andnobody living nearby can complain because it was there before theywere. They’re all deaf anyway but six planes landing at once are notsix times louder than six planes landing one at a time.

However, best of all, the RSPB can’t object because any birds

native to the reservoirs of Staines were long since sucked into theTrent engine of a passing 777 and shredded.

Sunday 1 December 2002

Cricket’s the National Sport of TimeWastersI understand that England recently lost a game of cricket. Good.The more we lose, the more our interest in the game wanes and theless it will dominate our newspapers and television screens.

Cricket – and I will not take any argument – is boring. Any sportwhich goes on for so long that you might need a ‘comfort break’ isnot a sport at all. It is merely a means of passing the time. Likereading.

Of course, we used to have televised reading. It was calledJackanory. Now we have Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is muchbetter. Things have moved on, but cricket has not.

I’m not sure that it can. Even if Nasser Hussain, who is the captainof England, were to invest in some new hair and marry CouncilHouse Spice (aka Claire Sweeney, the ex-Brookside actress turnedBig Brother contestant), it wouldn’t make any difference.

Nobody is quite sure how cricket began, though many peoplebelieve it was invented by shepherds who used their crooks todefend the wicket gate to the sheep fold. This would certainly figurebecause shepherds had many long hours to while away, withnothing much to do.

The first written reference to cricket was in 1300, when PrinceEdward played it with his friend Piers Gaveston. And again, thiswould figure. Princes, in those days, were not exactly rushed offtheir feet.

Cricket was spread around the world by British soldiers who foundthemselves marooned in godforsaken flea-bitten parts of the world

themselves marooned in godforsaken flea-bitten parts of the worldand needed something to keep them amused, not just for an hourbut for week after interminable week.

Today Australia dominates the game – which furthers my theory. Ofcourse they’re good at it. They have no distractions. And the onlyway we can ever beat them is to round up the unemployed and thewastrels and give them all bats. Certainly, they’d feel at home in thepavilion. It’s exactly the same as sitting in a bus shelter all day.

Let me put it this way – is there a sound more terrifying on aSunday afternoon than a child saying: ‘Daddy. Can we playMonopoly?’

Like cricket, Monopoly has no end. The rules explain how you canunmortgage a property and when you should build hotels on BondStreet but they don’t say, and they should, that the winner is the lastplayer left alive. And what about Risk? You make a calculation,based on the law of averages, that you can take the world butyou’re always stymied by the law of probability and end up out ofsteam, throwing an endless succession of twos and ones inKamchatka. Still, this is preferable to the modern version in whichGeorge W. Bush invades Iraq and we all die of smallpox.

Happily, my children are now eight, six and four so they’re way pastthe age when board games hold any appeal. Given the choice ofmortgaging Old Kent Road or shooting James Bond on aPlayStation, they’ll take the electronic option every time.

Then there are jigsaws, which I once had to explain to a Greek.‘Yes, you spend a couple of weeks putting all the pieces together soyou end up with a picture.’

‘Then what happens?’ he asked.

‘Well, you break it up again and put it back in the box.’

It’s not often I’ve felt empathy with a Greek, but I did then. And it’smuch the same story with crosswords. If scientists could harness thebrainpower spent every day on trying to find the answer to ‘Russianbanana goes backwards in France we hear perhaps’, then maybemankind might have cured cancer by now.

Crosswords, like jigsaws and cricket, are not really games inthemselves. They are simply tools for wasting time. And that’s notsomething that sits well in the modern world.

We may dream of living the slow life, taking a couple of hours overlunch and eating cheese until dawn, but the reality is that we have aheart attack if the traffic lights stay red for too long or the lift doorsfail to close the instant we’re ready to go.

Answering-machine messages are my particular bugbear. I want aname and a number, and that’s it. I don’t have time to sit and listento where you’ll be at three and who you’ll be seeing and why youneed to talk before then. And even if I do pick up the phonepersonally, I don’t want a chat. I’m a man. I don’t do chatting. Saywhat you have to say and go away.

British film-makers still haven’t got this. They spend hours with theirsepia lighting and their long character-developing speeches and it’sall pointless because we’d much rather watch a muscly Americansaying: ‘Die, m**********r.’

Slow-cooked lamb shanks for supper? Oh for God’s sake, I’ll get atakeaway.

Cricket, then, is from a bygone age when people invested theirmoney in time rather than in things. And now we have so manythings to play with and do, it seems odd to waste it watchingsomebody else playing what’s basically an elaborate game of catch.

somebody else playing what’s basically an elaborate game of catch.

Please stop watching – then it will go away.


Have I Got News… I’m Another FailedDeaytonOver the years I’ve always said no to appearing on Have I Got NewsFor You. Actually, that’s not true. I haven’t always said no, becausethey only asked once. However, had they asked again, I would havesaid no again.

There didn’t seem to be any upside. I would sit there, dripping likecheese in an old sock, while Ian Hislop, Paul Merton and AngusDeayton skated elegantly around their carefully choreographed andheavily scripted routine.

Like pretty well everyone, I knew how the show was put together.Throughout the week, a room full of the brightest writers in the landwould crank out jokes and then on studio day the presenters wouldhone and perm them to perfection.

The guests? Well they’d be like snotty kids, strapping themselvesinto a Spitfire and going up there, alone, against an entire battle-hardened German squadron. Yes, they might fire off a few bulletsbut they’d end up full of holes.

However, when the call came through a couple of weeks ago to sit inthe main chair, I needed smelling salts. ‘What, be the quizmaster?Me – the car bloke?’

This was like being asked to run the state opening of parliament. I’dhave the team on my side, making sure the throne was gold enoughand that my crown wouldn’t fall off. ‘Yes. Just yes.’

It was a bit disappointing that the evening before I was due torecord I had been invited to go out with four jolly attractive womenwho’d spent the previous few weeks learning how to be strippers

who’d spent the previous few weeks learning how to be strippersand who needed a man to accompany them on a tour of London’slap-dancing venues.

Normally, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse couldn’t havedragged me from that opportunity. But attempting to fly on HIGNFYwith a hangover and no sleep was not sensible, so I was in bed at11 o’clock in my smart pyjamas with the bunny rabbit ears.

In the morning a motorcyclist brought round the finished script on apurple cushion. It was very, very funny. And apparently quite simple,too. I just had to sit there, waiting for Paul and Ian to finish theirprepared verbal tennis, then I would read my gags from theautocue, pick up the cheque (with a forklift truck) and go home.

Er, well, it’s not quite like that.

I arrived at the studios at 9.30 in the morning to find that GeoffreyRobinson, the former paymaster-general, had been charged with aselection of motoring offences. Plainly, this was good material. Sohalf the script was thrown away to make room, and then the troublestarted.

Obviously the three scriptwriters, headed by snake-hipped Jed,wanted to dwell on the white powder that had allegedly been foundin Robinson’s car,* but the lawyers said it would be better to call it asubstance. A substance? That was no good. A substance could besomething on the bottom of his shoe. So after an hour or soeveryone agreed that it could be called a ‘mystery powder’.

So where were Paul and Ian while this was going on? Well, to beblunt, they were at home, in loose robes. They didn’t breeze in tillsix. And do you know something? They had not seen a script; theydidn’t even know who the guests were.

All they see before the show, and I mean half an hour before thetape-players start to turn, are the photographs to which they areasked to come up with captions and the four people in the odd-one-out round. They had the same amount of preparation as the guests.

Let me tell you something else, too. I had always imagined that aftertwelve years of being professionally cynical they would be cruel andbitter and combative.

But they were like parents before a school sports day. ‘Don’t worry,’they kept saying, ‘do your best. It’s not the winning.’ They were sokind that they nearly managed to shut down the hydrants in myarmpits.

And God they’re quick. I would ask a question that I know they hadnever seen or heard before and they’d be off, with a top-of-the-head banter that left me breathless. I wish you could have seen thefull hour and 40 minutes that they recorded rather than just the 29minutes that was transmitted.

I’m sorry to sound so gushing but Paul is properly funny. Andcrammed into that tiny head, Ian has an encyclopaedia.

I should explain that they really do care about winning. Which is oddbecause, from where I was sitting, the scores seemed to mount upin an entirely arbitrary fashion. I have no idea why Paul ended upwith sixteen and Ian with eleven. So far as I could work out, theyboth got nought.

And me? Well, I spent most of the evening reading from the autocuewhen I should have been looking at the notes on my desk. I forgotto ask two questions completely, I lost my earpiece so I couldn’t hearthe instructions from the gallery and at no point did I ever know whowas supposed to be answering what.

Doubtless it will all have looked seamless on television – they evenmanaged to make sense of Boris Johnson. But the simple fact of thematter is that 7 million people will have watched my performanceand thought: ‘Nope. He wasn’t as good as Angus Deayton either.’

I agree. And nobody ever will be.


Home Alone Can be the Perfect State for aChildJust last week I left my children, aged eight, six and four, at homealone. I only needed to buy the papers and it was just too much of afaff to find all their shoes and get them in the car when I’d only begone, at most, for five minutes.

Of course I was in a total panic about it. Sure, I’d asked theneighbour to keep an ear out, I’d written down my mobile phonenumber and I’d explained where the gun was, and how it could bespeed-loaded should someone unsavoury come to the door.

But despite these extensive precautions I still came back expectingto find them either in the fire or in white slavery in Turkmenistan.

So, like everyone else, I was horrified to learn this week that twomothers had left their kids at home while they went off, not for thepapers, but for a holiday.

One woman had arrived at Manchester airport where she found herson needed a passport (yeah, right), so she’d put him in a taxi andsent him home. The other had gone skiing. Dreadful. What’s theworld coming to? Something must be done.

However, let’s stop and think for a moment. The children left behindwere eleven and twelve and, while this may seem young to those ofus of a forty-ish disposition, we have to face the fact that todayeleven is the new seventeen.

If I’d been left at home alone when I was eleven, I’d have been deadof hunger or electrocution within the hour. Come to think of it, if Iwere left at home aged 42 there’d be the same result in the samesort of time frame.

sort of time frame.

We might like to think of an eleven-year-old as some newborn foal,all slimy and incapable with wobbly legs, but it’s not that long agothat eleven-year-olds were skilled in the arts of mining andpickpocketry. And nothing’s changed.

Today, most eleven-year-olds can make a roach, hotwire a car,outrun the police, fight an entire army of aliens, drink a bottle ofvodka without being sick and operate a digital satellite transceiver.So they should have no trouble at all with a microwave and a tinopener.

Certainly, most eleven-year-olds are far better able to fend forthemselves than most eighty-year-olds. And the state has noqualms about leaving them all by themselves for week afterinterminable week with no pension and no reliable means ofreaching the lavatory on time.

Can an eighty-year-old program a television or understand packetfood? Can an eighty-year-old afford the heating bills? Not usually.

Of course an eleven-year-old cannot afford heating bills either butat least he can hack into the power company’s accounts and adjusthis bill to nought.

Furthermore, you should put yourself in the shoes of the eleven-year-old. At home. Alone. Over Christmas.

For an eighty-year-old this is hell on earth, but for an eleven-year-old it’s about as close to heaven as you can get while your heart isstill beating.

No hirsute old ladies queuing up to kiss you on the mouth. NoQueen’s broadcast to the nation.

No sprouts. No Boxing Day parties with people ‘from the village’, noneed to wait until Christmas morning to play with your new Xboxgame, and no need to worry that someone might want to watchtelevision instead.

No need to open presents which you know are jumpers. No beingdragged off to church on Christmas Eve. Put your feet on thefurniture, dig out Mum’s X-rated videos, wonder who Joe Strummerwas and set the garage to loud.

And because you can eat what you want, where you want, with yourfingers, while slouching, and with your elbows on the table, there willbe no family rows and no volcanic explosions as, for the only time ina whole year, a family is forced to coexist in a small space for a longtime.

I don’t want to be bah-humbug about this. I love the idea of aChristmas around the tree, watching my children unwrap theirpresents and settling down after lunch to watch Steve McQueen onhis motorcycle. But those days are gone and they won’t be back.

Let’s not forget that today is the past that people in the future willdream about.

The fact is that I’m with my children for a maximum of fifteen minutesa day, and this is no match for the constant bombardment they geton Radio 1 from Sara Cox and the Cheeky Girls. I want my eight-year-old to be a good girl. But over Christmas I learn she wants tobe a ‘teenage dirtbag baby’.

So, I suspect the mother who goes to Spain over Christmas withouther bolshie, prepubescent, monosyllabic, baggy-trousered son willhave a better time as a result. But maybe the boy would, too.

Of course, giving independence to the pre-teens may sound sad,horrific even, like a return to Dickensian times. But if we acceptthey’re capable and socially active at ten or eleven, it might also getthe government out of a hole. Because while the state may beunable to afford to pay pensions, parents could get support fromtheir children by sending the ungrateful, mollycoddled spoilt littlebrats up some chimneys.


Ivan the Terrible is One Hell of aHolidaymakerA recent survey found that the British are the most hated of all theworld’s holidaymakers, but to be honest it’s hard to see why.

For sure, a group of electricians from Rochdale on holiday in Ibizamight be a bit noisy, and they may be sick on the municipalflowerbeds from time to time, but us – you and me – in our rentedfarmhouses in Provence, we’re no bother at all. We eat the localcheese. We drink the local wine. We say ‘bonsoir ’to the postmanevery morning. We’re as good as gold.

The Germans, on the other hand, make terrible bedfellows. Mainlybecause when they’re around there are no beds left. Ever since wewere introduced, socially, by package holidays in the 1960s, we’veknown that when it comes to antisocial buffet-hoggingpigheadedness on holiday, the Germans are in a class of their own.

But not any more. I’ve just come back from Dubai, where I spentsome time at Wild Wad, an enormous water park where you sit onthe inner tube from a tractor and then get knocked off it in 101 newand exciting ways you’d never thought of.

There were, as you can imagine, fairly long queues for the betterrides, but hey, that’s okay. We could handle the wait. We’re patient.We’re British. And that means we’re the best queuers in the wholeworld.

Oh no, we’re not. We spend ten minutes queueing for a No. 27 busand we think we know it all. But believe me, compared with theRussians, we know nothing. They spent 70 years queueing for aloaf of bread and they know every trick in the book. Time and timeagain I’d blink, or bend down to talk to a child, and that would be it.

again I’d blink, or bend down to talk to a child, and that would be it.A man-mountain would nip in front.

And I was loath to cough discreetly and tap him on the shoulder,since the shoulder in question was invariably enlivened with somesort of special forces tattoo. A baby being torn in half by twobulldozers. A dagger in a kneecap. That sort of thing.

Let’s be honest, shall we. These guys were in Dubai. They werespending probably £1,000 a day on their hotel rooms. They haddigital cameras that made the Japanese look backward andsatphones that could steer the space station. And you don’t get thatsort of hardware, or holiday, by writing poetry. They were mafia, andthat meant they were ex-KGB or Spetsnaz.

Only last year I heard of a Russian holidaymaker in the south ofFrance. Like so many visitors to the Côte d’Azur, he was drawn to avilla on the coast and went to see an estate agent about it. ‘Pardon,monsieur,’ said the estate agent. ‘Mais il n’est pas possible devisiter cette maison parce qu’elle n’est pas à vendre.’

This obviously displeased the Russian because the followingmorning the estate agent was found buried head down on thebeach, with just his feet sticking out of the sand. And that’s the thingabout Russians. We wear a No Fear T-shirt. They wear the look intheir eyes.

And that’s why I chose not to laugh at their swimming trunks.However, I’m home now so I don’t mind telling you they werehilarious. Like Speedos but without the style, and a bit tighter.

Still, they were better dressed than their wives. Elsewhere in theworld the thong bathing suit is the preserve of Peter Stringfellow orsize-eight girls. In Russia it is also worn by people who are eighttons or 80 years old.

tons or 80 years old.

Now I’m told that there are some extremely beautiful Russian girls.But obviously they’re all on the internet, because the ones in Dubaiwere like turnips.

Except one, who was like nothing on earth. Let’s start with herbreasts, which were not vast. Vast is too small a word to convey thescale. When her boyfriend, who had a tattoo of two hammerheadsharks eating a man’s eyes on his forearm, chose them from thecatalogue, he’d probably been tempted by the ones marked‘massive’. But in the end he’d gone for the top of the range. Theones known in medical circles as: ‘Oh, my God. They’re movingtowards us.’

The area underneath them had its own micro-climate. And yet theywere not the first thing I noticed about the girl to whom they wereattached.

The first thing I noticed were her lips, which were so full of collagenshe looked like an orang-utan. An orang-utan with a pigtail.

And two full-scale models of the R101 in her bikini top. I spent sucha long time looking at her that when I looked back again, half ofUkraine had slipped in front of me in the queue.

Eventually I did get a ride, though, in a sort of big canal where giantwaves came along every so often and made you go upside down. Itwas fun until I crashed into a woman who had obviously eaten somuch pizza she’d begun to look like one.

Either that or she’d been to Chernobyl for her holidays. Each waveremoved not so much a layer of skin as a lump of it.

There’s something else about the Russkies, too. They made noeffort to smile or chat. At least the Germans are happy to come over

effort to smile or chat. At least the Germans are happy to come overand apologise for their country’s conduct in the war. The Russiansstill look like they’re fighting it.


In Terror Terms, Rambo Has a Lot toAnswer ForDo you remember the television show Dallas? If you do, you mightrecall a character called Cliff Barnes who was a bit of a loser, a bitof a joke.

He was in the oil business, like his father. He was born and raised inTexas. He became known on the international stage… Remind youof anyone?

Just a thought. Anyway, after the skyscraper business in New York,Cliff talked at some length about the long memory of the Americanwarrior and how no stone would be left unturned in the search forthe men responsible and in particular, Osama bin Laden.

Finding the men responsible was never going to be easy, since theywere buried under a couple of million tons of rubble.

But it turns out that finding bin Laden was even harder.

They had a good look round Afghanistan and a cursory sweep ofPakistan but now, obviously, someone’s lost the big atlas becausethey seem to have given up and decided to have a war with Iraqinstead.

So does this mean that Ozzie is off the hook? No, not a bit of it,because he is now to be hunted down by the world’s most fearlessand monosyllabic soldier.

Yes, the CIA with its sophisticated spies in the sky failed to find him.And even though they blew up every cave from Iran toTurkmenistan, the American air force failed to kill him. So now it’stime to wheel out the human nuke.

time to wheel out the human nuke.

Enter, with a fireball in the background and his locks flowing in thewind, Sylvester Stallone, who announced last week that Rambo, the1980s superhero, is set to return.

And guess what? He’s off to Afghanistan to stab some Taliban andmastermind a plot which brings bin Laden to justice.

This is likely to be tricky since the last time we saw Rambo, back in1988, he was fighting with the mujahidin against the Russians in afilm that was dedicated, and I quote, ‘to the gallant people ofAfghanistan’.

I actually took the trouble of watching Rambo III last week and, withthe benefit of hindsight, it was hysterically prophetic. There’s thismarvellous scene when an American colonel is berating his Russiancaptors with these fine words: ‘Every day your war machine losesground to a bunch of poorly armed and poorly equipped freedomfighters.

‘The fact is you underestimated your enemy. If you’d checked yourhistory, you’d know that these people here have never given up toanyone. They’d rather die.’

Now we know that Hollywood is capable of some howlers. Who canforget U571, in which a brave American submarine crew capturedan Enigma decoding device from the Nazis and won the war?

Then there was Pearl Harbor, in which a brave American pilot, flyinga superior American fighter plane, won the battle of Britain and wonthe war again.

I know what you’re going to say: that in films, dramatic licence ismore important than rigid historical fact.

We leave the historical fact to our politicians, like Tony Blair, whofamously told Cliff how the Americans had stood bravely at our sideduring the Blitz.

However, most people do not read newspapers. They changechannels when the television news comes on. And they do notsnuggle up at night with a nice Simon Schama. They get theirhistory and current affairs from the cinema, and that’s why thepeople who make films bear some responsibility for the course ofworld events.

I wonder, for instance, how much money Noraid might have raised ifthe IRA were not ceaselessly portrayed in Hollywood films as genial,whiskey-swilling freedom fighters with a real and noble grudgeagainst the wicked colonial British.

Time and again we saw Richard Harris in a smart overcoat givingpresents to children while marauding gangs of British squaddiesdrove their armoured Land Rovers over a selection of prams andpushchairs.

So when the boys came round your bar with the collecting tins, well,hey dude, have a dollar.

They no doubt did much the same after they saw Rambo III andnow they probably feel like a bunch of chumps.

Who knows? Perhaps the young men of Algeria saw it, too, andthought: ‘My, those Afghans look brave and fearless. We must joinforces with them as soon as possible.’

I learnt the other day that one of the ancient enemies of theAfghans wrote a poem about them: ‘May God deliver us from thevenom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger and the vengeance of the

Afghan.’

Stallone would be well advised to remember that as he puts RamboIV into production. Because if this film is as stupid and asirresponsible as its predecessor, it might just provoke some‘freedom fighter’ to drive his ‘holy war’ into the side of the SearsTower.

America is not invincible – but unfortunately Cliff probably doesn’tunderstand this.

In the world he comes from, you die and then a few years later youcome back to life in the shower.


House-Price Slump? It’s the School Run,StupidSo the value of your six-bedroom country house with its six-acregarden has fallen from £6 million to £600,000 in the past six days.Country Life magazine is chock-full of advertisements for propertiesthat have been on the market for months. Huge discounts are therefor the taking. And how do you double the value of aGloucestershire house? Simple. Put in carpets and curtains.

According to the experts, this meltdown in the shires is becausenobody’s job is safe in EC1 and City bonuses are much smallerthan usual. Really? Well, first let’s find out who these ‘experts’ are.

When a former public schoolboy moves to London, his options arelimited. The bright ones end up in banking, while those who are onlyone plum short of a fruit salad do stockbroking. Those who aremildly daft end up in insurance and those who are borderline idioticwind up behind the counter in Hacketts.

That leaves Rupert. He needs a job where he can wear a suit orelse he won’t get invited to the right drinks parties in Fulham. ButRupert cannot add two and two without falling over. Rupert thinksTim Nice-But-Dim is a documentary. So Rupert is an estate agent.That makes him an expert on house prices.

Now Rupert reckons that it’s all falling apart in the countrysidebecause he met some chap at a ‘do’ last week who had just beenfired from Goodyear, Stickleback and Bunsen Burner. ‘Poor chap.Was going to buy a house in Hampshire. Now he can’t afford it.’

Oh dear, Rupert, you are wide of the mark. Sure, City bonusesaffect the market, but only slightly and only in Surrey. How manyCity boys are there in Alnwick or the Trough of Bowland? Scotland,

City boys are there in Alnwick or the Trough of Bowland? Scotland,too, is far beyond the reach of a commuter train – as is the WestCountry. How, pray, do City bonuses affect the price of a recentbarn conversion in Milford Haven?

I live in what Tatler magazine once called the country’s ‘G-spot’. I amless than an hour from Notting Hill but by the same token I’m onlyfive miles from Jilly Cooper Central in Gloucestershire. This is theCotswolds and thanks to a local wildlife park there are more whiterhinos up here than there are City boys.

So if it’s not people in stripy shirts tightening their purse strings,what has brought the whole market to its knees?

Well, I know five families who live within three miles of where I amsitting now. Each has a substantial wisteria-softened eighteenth-century house with a pool, views that would make Elgar priapic andenough land to control their own sight lines. And all of them aremoving out.

This has nothing to do with hunting. Since none of these peopleride, none of them care. Nor does it have anything to do with foot-and-mouth. They may own land, but only so as to stop anyonedoing anything with it.

Furthermore, it has nothing to do with the closure of the local bankor post office. These people have Range Rovers and staff to posttheir letters. So why, then, are they leaving in such vast numbersthat suddenly the countryside has become a forest of ‘for sale’signs?

It is the school run. Their children go to school in Oxford, which iseighteen miles away. During the day it is a 25-minute drive, which isnot ideal but it’s bearable.

However, in the morning it’s an hour and a half and that is simplytoo much. The children need to be up at 6.30 a.m. and in the car by7.15 a.m. They have to eat their breakfast out of Tupperwarecontainers on the way. It’s even worse at night because they don’tget home until six. By the time they’ve done their prep, their musicpractice, had supper and a bath, it’s bedtime. That is no life for asix-year-old.

So while the parents may be blissfully happy in their Cotswold stonepalaces, they are moving into the centre of Oxford for the sake oftheir children’s sanity.

To cure this, the local council, which is borderline insane when itcomes to roads, will undoubtedly follow in the footsteps of Londonand impose a congestion charge, which will add £100 a month tothe already significant school fees.

It will argue, of course, that the children should go on the bus, butthey are six years old, for crying out loud – whatever Uncle KenLivingstone says.

So then the local Nazis will argue that they shouldn’t be going toschool so far away. True, probably, but that is a decision people canmake on their own. They don’t need some woman with a bicycleknitted out of bits of her husband’s beard to make the decision ontheir behalf.

What’s to be done? The solution is simple. There are five families,each with two children, each doing the school run every morning.Why not club together to buy a minibus? The cost is minimal, it cango in the bus lane so the time saving is immense, you are happy,the eco-beards are happy and that just leaves Rupert.

Rupert is not happy because his friends in the City are still losing

their jobs, but the country-house market has repaired itselfovernight: ‘Gosh. This analysis business is harder than I thought.’

Exactly. Stick to breathing. It’s the only thing you’re any good at.


The Lottery will Subsidise Everything,Except FunThere’s some doubt about whether the country can afford to back abid for the Olympics in 2012. The money, we’re told, would be betterspent on the bottomless pits of health and education.

Oh, for crying out loud. We are the fourth-richest country in theworld. If the Greeks can organise a fortnight of running andjumping, then for God’s sake why can’t we?

Sure, the £5 billion it would cost to host this big sports day wouldpay for an awful lot of baby incubators with plenty left over to housethe refugees and fit new hips to every old lady in the country. Butthat’s like spending all your surplus family income on insurance andpiggy banks. Just occasionally you’ve got to say ‘what the heck’ andbugger off to Barbados for a fortnight.

What we need is some job demarcation here. We let thegovernment look after the dull, worthy stuff and then we have aseparate organisation solely concerned with making us feel goodabout living in this overcrowded, grey and chilly island. It won’t beallowed to buy hips so nobody can complain when it doesn’t.

The national lottery should have been that organisation, but sadlyit’s more dour and Presbyterian than Gordon Brown’s drinkscabinet.

It has a remit to provide funding in six areas. First, there’s ‘the arts’,which in principle is far too noble and which in reality meanspumping money into small black-and-white films about an Asianwoman who does nothing for a year.

Then there are charities, sports, projects to celebrate themillennium (they mucked that one up) and health, education andthe environment. Why? Why use our fun money to pay for morebloody baby incubators – that’s the government’s job.

My real bête noire, however, is the final category. Nearly 5p in everylottery£1 (£300 million a year) goes on ‘heritage’. If you don’t knowwhat that means, here are some of the organisations applying forgrants.

The Royal Parks Agency wants £428,000 to conserve and restoreBushy Park, by Hampton Court. Nope, sorry, tell the Queen to payfor it.

Then we have the Museum of Advertising and Packaging, whichwants £948,000 to pay for some new buildings. What? All the richestpeople in the country are in advertising and packaging. You want£948,000? Go and see the Rausings.

Here’s a good one: Age Concern Northumberland would like£38,900 for a project called Meals on Wheels for Garden Birds. No,no, no, no, you can’t have it – it’s too dull.

The list of applicants runs into the thousands and while there’s nolist of who gets what in the end, you can use the search engine. Istarted by typing in ‘multi’ and ‘cultural’ and the poor computernearly exploded. ‘Church’ had a similar effect.

Why is lottery money being used to restore churches? The churchis richer than royalty. It’s even richer, I’m told, than Jonathan Ross. Ifit needs a few bob to replaster a nave or two, it should think aboutbringing in bigger audiences. And if it can’t put enough bums onseats, it should think about packing up. Or performing only inGermany. That’s what Barclay James Harvest did.

But why is lottery money being used for ‘heritage’ in the first place?Maintaining the fabric of the country is surely the responsibility ofthe government. Lottery money should be spent on building newstuff designed only to make us feel good.

The government buys the baby incubators, which are ‘useful’. Thelottery buys us statues, which are ‘amazing’.

Take Parliament Square in London. It’s an island surrounded on allsides by three lanes of snarling diesel engines. You can’t get to itand there’s no point in going anyway unless you want to while awayan afternoon looking at the guano on Winston Churchill’s hat.

It is therefore the perfect place for lottery money to be spent on ahuge new fountain.

In this country, most people’s idea of a fountain is some cherubhaving a wee.

Last year the Fountain Society gave its award for best new waterfeature to Sheffield for its cascade in the Peace Gardens. It’s good,especially at night, but (comparatively speaking) it’s a bit of aDimmock.

Think of Vienna where crystalline water gushes from every hole inevery paving stone, or Paris where giant cannons fire trillions ofgallons into a frenzy of rainbows under the Eiffel Tower.

In Dubai you have the seven-star Burj Al Arab. It’s the best hotel inthe world, more flunkies than an Edwardian tea party, rooms thesize of Wales, food to stump A. A. Gill and views from the top-floorrestaurant of F-15s lining up on their Baghdad bomb runs. It haseverything.

But all anyone who has been there talks about is the fountain in the

lobby.

Fountains can do that. Everyone loves a fountain and ParliamentSquare is the perfect place to build the mother of all water features.

The ‘heritage’ lottery fund could easily afford it – although theMuseum of Advertising and Packaging might be disappointed – andthere would still be enough left over for an observatory in the PeakDistrict, a latticework bridge of ice and light over the M1, an Angel ofthe South and, with a bit of saving, a dirty great Olympic stadium in2012.


The Shuttle’s Useless, But Book Me on theNext FlightMomentous news. George Bush has said something sensible. At amemorial service for the seven astronauts who died last Saturdayhe said: ‘This cause of exploration and discovery is not an optionwe choose; it is a desire written in the human heart.’

Fine words. But this is America, a country where nobody is allowedto die of anything except extreme old age, and only then after alengthy public inquiry. So instead of ploughing on with morejourneys of ‘exploration and discovery’, the space shuttle has beengrounded.

The message is clear. They’re telling us that the crew’s safety isparamount, but if that’s the case why does the space shuttle haveno ejection hatch? That may sound silly but back in 1960 the boffinsdidn’t think so, because they sent a chap called Joe Kittinger to analtitude of 102,800 feet in a helium balloon. That’s almost twentymiles up, by the way, and to all intents and purposes is space.

Once he reached the correct height he opened the door of hiscapsule… and jumped. Moments later he became the first man tobreak the sound barrier, without a plane, as he tore past 714 mph.The thickening air slowed him gradually until, at 17,000 feet, heopened his main parachute, landed gently in the New Mexicodesert, had a cigarette and went home for tea.

A couple of years ago I met the guy – he now flies an aerial-signwriting biplane in California – and he was absolutely convincedthat if the shuttle had had an escape hatch the crew of Challengerwould be alive today.

But what of Columbia? NASA officials say they will leave ‘no stoneunturned’ in their quest to find out what went wrong. It’s hard toknow precisely what this means. Bush said he would leave ‘no stoneunturned’ in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. So on that basis NASAwill probably look under a few rocks in eastern Texas and thendeclare war, for no obvious reason, on France.

Piecing Columbia together again and trying to figure out what wentwrong is a PR stunt. Plainly, in a 20-year old craft that’s been tospace 28 times there is no design fault. Whatever went wrong wasan accident and even if they do work out what it was, it won’t stopaccidents happening. They could cure cancer but people would stilldie of heart attacks.

The law of averages now says that there will be a shuttle crashevery ten years.

The law of probability says that if you launched one tomorrow itwould be fine. But there won’t be a launch tomorrow. And the waypeople are talking there might never be a launch again.

Some say there’s no need for manned space flight any more.Others point at the space station and say it’s a scientific redherring. And inevitably the Guardian asks how many babyincubators could be bought with the $15 billion (£9.1 billion) that itcosts to keep NASA going every year.

This makes me so angry that my teeth itch. Columbia was namedafter Columbus, for crying out loud: what if he’d decided not tocross the Atlantic because it was a bit scary?

Then you have Chuck Yeager. In 1963 he was presented with aStarfighter NF 104. He knew that when the nose was angled up by30 degrees then air no longer passed over the tail fin and that itwould spin. He knew that the ejector seat fired downwards. He knew

would spin. He knew that the ejector seat fired downwards. He knewthat it was called the Widowmaker by other pilots. But he still tried tofly one into space. That doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him ahuman.

Yes, I know the shuttle’s only real role these days is to service thespace station and yes, I’m sure that seeing whether geraniums canflower in zero gravity will only slightly increase our insight into theworkings of the universe. But we’re missing the point. What thespace station does is not important. What matters is the fact that wecan build such a thing.

It’s the same story with the shuttle itself. I’ve been to the factory inLouisiana where they refurbish the giant fuel tanks that are fishedfrom the ocean after each mission. I’ve been to one of the rockettests up the road in Stennis and it’s like listening to the future.

I’ve even been allowed to sit in the cockpit of a shuttle and pressbuttons. Yes, it’s ugly and yes, it’s expensive. But never forget thatthis machine generates 37 million horsepower and is doing 120 mphby the time its tail clears the tower.

Remember, too, that the temperature on its nose as it re-enters theEarth’s atmosphere is hotter than the surface of the sun.

The shuttle – one of the most intriguing and awesome technologicalmarvels of the modern age – is America’s only worthwhile gift to theworld.

Would I put my money where my mouth is? Would I climb aboard ifthey launched one tomorrow? Absolutely, without a moment’shesitation.

And I would do so with some other unusually wise words from Bushringing in my ears. ‘Each of [the Columbia astronauts] knew greatendeavours are inseparable from great risks and each of them

endeavours are inseparable from great risks and each of themaccepted those risks willingly, even joyfully, in the cause ofdiscovery.’


When the Chips are Down, I’m with theFatherlandFollowing the rousing anti-war speech made by Germany’s foreignminister last week, I would like to proclaim that from now on ‘Ich binein Berliner’.

Yes, I know this actually means‘I ama doughnut’ but it gets my pointacross perfectly well. And my point is this…

When was the last time you heard one of our politicians talking sovery obviously from the heart? Fuelled by passion rather than aneed to keep on the right side of his party’s PR machine, JoschkaFischer laid into Donald Rumsfeld, slicing through the Americannonsense with a very simple and very effective ‘I don’t believe you’.

Over the years I have said some unkind things about the Krauts,but from now on, and until I change my mind, the teasing will stop.So sit back, slot a bit of Kraftwerk into your Grundig, light up aWest, take a sip of your Beck’s and let’s have a canter throughsome of the Fatherland’s achievements over the years.

We think Trainspotting was clever but let’s not forget that back in1981 two chaps from Stern magazine wrote an immeasurably morepowerful drug movie called Christiane F. And while I’m at it, Das Bootwas a much better submarine film than Morning Departure, in whichRichard Attenborough’s upper lip momentarily unstiffened for nodiscernible reason. In fact, Das Boot is probably the best film evermade.

What about comedy? It’s often said that the Germans don’t have asense of humour, but look at it this way. They may laugh atdesperately unfunny stuff such as Benny Hill and Are You beingServed?, but who made it in the first place?

Served?, but who made it in the first place?

Then we have music. Quite apart from Haydn, Handel, Brahms,Beethoven and Bach, can you think of a better pop tune thanNena’s ‘99 Red Balloons’? Bubblegum with a political undertone,and you never got that from Bucks Fizz.

Other things that the Germans gave the world include contactlenses, the globe, the printing press, X-rays, the telescope andLevi-Strauss; and chemistry lessons would have been a lot less funwere it not for the Bunsen burner.

What else? Well, it was Frank Whittle who invented the jet engine,there’s no doubt about that, but the Luftwaffe had jets in its planeslong before we did.

Similarly, the Americans and the Russians spent most of the 1960sfighting to gain supremacy over one another in space, but bothwere using German scientists and German rockets.

Got a Range Rover? That’s German these days and so is the newMini, the new Bentley, the new Rolls-Royce, the new Bugatti, thenew Lamborghini and all new Chryslers. The Rover 75 is German,the entire Spanish car industry is German and by this time next yearI bet they’ll have Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Fiat as well.

Out in the Middle East, German soldiers may be a bit thin on theground but the planes we’re flying are largely German and let’s notforget our SA80 rifles. They were designed and built in Britain butthey didn’t work, and all of them have had to be fixed by Heckler &Koch. Which is German.

I don’t know very much about football but I do know that the result in1966 and the 5–1 drubbing in Munich were freak occurrences.Normally their players make ours look disabled. And it’s the samestory in tennis, motor racing, gliding, invading Poland and skiing.

story in tennis, motor racing, gliding, invading Poland and skiing.

In fact, the only way we can beat the Germans at sport is byinventing games which they’re too clever to play. Such as cricket,for instance, and that ice thing where women do the vacuuming infront of a kettle.

I should also like at this point to explain that I’d walk over KateWinslet’s head to get to Nastassja Kinski.

Of course, when it comes to food the Germans are rubbish. We’remuch better thanks to our top chefs like Marco Pierre White, AngusSteak House and Raymond Blanc.

Eurosceptics are forever asking who we want running the country:Tony Blair or a bunch of unelected German bankers. Well, since I’drather have a weevil than His Tonyness, I’d have to go for thebankers.

Let’s face it: if a German Tube train grazed a wall, lightly injuring ahandful of people on board, they’d tow it away, replace thedamaged track and have the network up and running by morning.Also, when their roads are coated with a thin veneer of snow, theysend out a fleet of snow ploughs. The notion that you might bestuck on an autobahn for twenty hours because of inclementweather is utterly preposterous.

So what that they all like to belong to a club – there’s a society inCologne ‘for the appreciation of the Irish postal service’ – and sowhat if you aren’t allowed to mow your lawn on a Sunday.

Given the big choice of being ordered about by Gerhard Schroder,or Rumsfeld, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.

America likes to talk about how it saved Europe from tyranny twice

in the past century. True, but let’s not forget that they wereunbelievably late on both occasions. Predictably, the Germans wereas punctual as ever. I like that in a man. I like it in a nation, too. Andthat’s why this week I am mostly a doughnut.


Save the Turtles: Put Adverts on TheirShellsIt’s been a bad week for the world’s wildlife with the news thatmacaque monkeys have joined a list of 300 species in which thefemales are known to prefer girl on girl action to proper sex with amale.

It was also revealed that the formidable leatherback turtle has beenput on the endangered list. But because the turtle spends most ofits life half a mile below the surface of the sea, scientists have beenunable to say whether the scarcity of numbers is due to rampantlesbianism or ruthless Mexican tuna fishermen.

Either way it’s a shame because the leatherback has been aroundfor 100 million years.

Indeed, some of the more aristocratic examples, such as theLeather Back Smythes for instance, can trace their family treesback to a time when the seas were patrolled by plesiosauruses. Andthat beats the hell out of the Fitzalan-Howards who go back only to1066.

So what’s to be done? Well, I’ve often argued that the best way tokick-start a dying species is to start eating it. No, really. If someonecould convince the Observer housewives of Hoxton and Hackney ineast London that the best way to put a sheen back in their hair wasa daily bowl of giant panda chunks, someone, somewhere, wouldfigure out a way to get the lazy sods breeding again.

However, I’m not sure this would work with a leatherback. I’ve eatensnakes, dogs, small whole birds in France and crocodiles, butTommy Turtle is my line in the sand. I don’t care if turtles turn out tobe the antidote for cancer, I’m not eating even a small part of one

be the antidote for cancer, I’m not eating even a small part of oneand that’s that.

Don’t worry, though. I do have a suggestion which should help inthese troubled times. I suggest that we use their shells asadvertising hoardings.

Why not? In the olden days, advertisements were limited to books,television and town-centre hoardings, but now you find themeverywhere.

Every time I log on to the internet, I’m asked if I would like a biggerpenis (yes, but not if it comes with a virus), so why not advertise onthe back of a turtle? It moves slowly up the beach and is watchedintensely by lots of people who may well be interested in buying,say, a new pair of binoculars.

Think. The nozzle of the petrol pump urges you to buy a Snickersbar when you are in the Shell shop and, as you queue to board aplane, the airport tunnel is festooned with reasons for switching toHSBC. It seems that the decision on where to put your money hasnow come down to finding out which bank manager can make handsignals in Greece without causing offence.

Then, when you get off the plane, the luggage trolley advertises allthe new and exciting ways of getting to the city centre. Even theback of a parking ticket is now a mini-hoarding.

In the days of George Dixon, phone boxes were boxes in which youfound a phone.

But not any more. Now they are full of advertisements for youngasylum ladies from Albania as well, curiously, as posters which talkabout the advantages of having a mobile phone.

Have you been in a London taxi lately? The undersides of thefoldaway seats carry advertisements telling you to put anadvertisement there. I got a mailshot last week asking me tosponsor a child. Does that mean some poor African orphan has towalk around with ‘Watch Jeremy Clarkson’ on his forehead?

Advertisers have bought up every square inch of everywhere wherepeople stand still. I went to a pub the other day which had adverts infront of the urinals and it’s the same story in lifts, cinemas, Tubetrains and, I presume, buses.

Fancy chilling out in some remote beauty spot where you can getaway from the hurly-burly of consumerism? Forget it. Chances areyou’ll find a bench complete with a plaque advertising some deadperson who also liked to sit there.

In town centres, every hanging basket and roundabout issponsored, although on the open road things are better. Advertisersare banned from putting hoardings within sight of a motorway, butdon’t think you are safe. If Melvyn Bragg’s arts programme on Radio4 becomes too incomprehensible and you flick over to Classic FM,pretty soon you’ll be brought down to earth and invited to buy yourvery own garden furniture.

The only problem is that the sheer number of people needed to findplaces for these adverts, and the even bigger number needed tosell the space, means that in the end there’ll be nobody left to makeanything worth advertising.

I went to Sheffield last week and was horrified to note that the vaststeelworks have been pulled down to make way for an equally vastshopping centre which, presumably, can exist only because all thepeople who used to make knives and forks are now employedadvertising the shopping centre.

Soon advertising agencies will be the only businesses left. That’sbad for the economy but irrelevant as far as the turtle is concerned.He doesn’t care whether it says Corus on his shell or Saatchi Cohenand Oven Glove. Just so long as it says something.


Give Me a Moment to Sell YouStaffordshireBoo. Hiss. Ref-er-ee. In last week’s controversial Country Life poll tofind Britain’s nicest and nastiest counties, Staffordshire was namedthe worst place in all England.

At first I assumed that being a Country Life survey it would havenothing to do with the real world. I thought they would have countedthe number of monogrammed swimming pools in each county,divided that by the availability of arugula and added the number ofhunts to come up with Devon as a winner.

But no. They’ve been quite thorough, looking at house prices, theweather, the efficiency of the local council, the quality of the pubs,tranquillity, the arts, the lot. And they ended up with a list that hadDevon, Gloucestershire and Cornwall at the top (Cornwall? Havethey never seen Straw Dogs?) and Staffordshire at the bottom.

Now I admit that Staffordshire is a bit like one of those lost cities inEgypt. We know it to be there. We can see it on maps. And it’swritten about in books. But nobody knows where it is exactly.

Plus, it’s ringed by places of such horror that even Indiana Joneswould think twice about trying to go there. He may have facedrunaway balls and poisoned darts in his quest for the lost ark butshould he, one day, mount an expedition to locate the ancient city ofStafford, he will have to go through either Wales, Birmingham orCheshire. Grisly.

I know where Staffordshire is because I spent most of my mostinteresting years there. I went to school about half a mile from it, myvirginity went west in Yoxall, I got my first speeding ticket on the A38outside Bartonunder-Needwood, and it was in Abbots Bromley that I

outside Bartonunder-Needwood, and it was in Abbots Bromley that Ilearnt how to be chemically inconvenienced, how to be thrown out ofa pub, how to be chucked by a girlfriend without blubbing, how todrive fast, how to do everything that matters, really.

No, honestly. In the Coach and Horses I learnt that it was possible tosnog a girl and play pool at the same time. You don’t pick up a tricklike this in Tiverton, that’s for sure.

I remember, too, going home from parties in those misty dawnmornings that were a hallmark of that baking summer of 1976.Across the Blithfield Reservoir on the boot of some girl’s mother’sTriumph Stag, Bob Seger’s Night Moves on the eight-track. Thatwas Staffordshire and God it was good.

So when I saw the result of the Country Life survey I was horrified.

Staffordshire worse than Hertfordshire? Worse than Essex? Worsethan East Sussex and even Surrey? Rubbish. If Kent is the gardenof England, then Surrey is its patio.

Staffordshire, however, is one of its lungs. The rolling farmland nearUttoxeter, replete with wisteria villages, is as delightfully English asanywhere in the country and the Cannock Chase on a dampautumn morning, with the dew in the ferns, is like Yosemite, withoutthe cliffs to fall off or the bears to eat you.

Actually, to be honest, it’s not like Yosemite at all, but there is a lotof wildlife. Deer. Deer. More deer. If you’re really lucky, you mightcatch a glimpse of a great crested Lord Lichfield stomping about thewoods. And where does the Duke of Devonshire live? Derbyshire,that’s where.

Mind you, he’s about the only thing that has come out of Devon. I’mstruggling now to think of anything in my house that was madethere. And you could spray the county with machine-gun fire without

there. And you could spray the county with machine-gun fire withouthitting a single musician, artist or rock band. You wouldn’t hit apheasant either. The bloody things are all far too high.

Whereas Staffordshire is the birthplace of your lavatory bowl, theClimax Blues Band, Dr Johnson, all your crockery and RobbieWilliams. It’s also home to my oldest friend, who has the best namein the history of speech: Dick Haszard. And even better, his uncle’sa major.

I was explaining all of this to the man who edits my column. Therewas lots of puffed-up indignation and tutting. So we agreed that Iwouldn’t write, as planned, about that Swiss yacht winning theAmerica’s Cup and that I would write in defence of Staffordshire.

Sadly, though, I can’t. The problem is the towns. Stafford. Lichfield.Stoke.

They’re all ghastly. And it’s all very well having the Cannock Chase,but it’s named after Cannock, which would be the worst town in theworld were it not for Burton upon Trent. Rugeley is a power station.Tamworth is a pig, Newcastle under Lyme is just confusing andUttoxeter is hard to spell. All you can buy on the high street in any ofthese places is a house or a hamburger, and at night all any ofthem offer is a polyurethane tray of monosodium glutamate and thepromise of coming home with a beer bottle sticking out of your lefteye.

I still maintain that it’s not the worst county. I’d far rather live inStaffordshire than Surrey but, and this is a serious point, trying toargue that you’d have a good time there because I did 25 years agois daft. Nearly as daft, in fact, as those professional Scousers whofrom their piles on the banks of the Thames still maintain thatLiverpool’s the greatest place on Earth. Well, if that’s the case,

Cilla, why don’t you push off back to Walton?

Sunday 9 March 2003

A Quick Snoop Behind the Queen’s NetCurtainsLast week the Queen of England very kindly agreed to break offfrom her waving duties and lend a hand with a television programmeI’m making about the Victoria Cross.

And so on Wednesday I slipped into a whistle and went toBuckingham Palace to see some prototype medals she’d found in acupboard. Sadly, I never met my new researcher but I did have asnout around the state rooms, which provided a rare insight into thelife of the royals.

First of all, I’ve never really understood why the richest and mostpowerful of the world’s royal families has to live behind a CoronationStreet, working-class veil of net curtains. There are no nets atVersailles, for instance. But it turns out they are weighted at thebottom and designed to catch flying glass should someone set off abomb.

That’s something you andIdon’t have to worry about, and nor do wehave to share our house with 500 staff, most of whom, it seems, willone day take the tabloid shilling and spill the beans on your toiletryhabits.

Then there’s the bothersome business of guests. Last week thenew president of Albania was scheduled to make a twenty-minutevisit. Imagine what that must be like.

Going to meet him off the Eurostar and trying not to look surprisedwhen he emerges, not from the carriage, but from a hidey-holeunderneath the bogies.

Then she’s got the weekly visits from His Tonyness. They probablyweren’t so bad when he was a new boy but now it must be awfullywearing to have to call him sir and kiss his shoes all the time.

Mind you, he’s nothing compared with the ordinary people. Prettywell every day a bunch of hand-wringing do-gooders goes to thepalace for an official function of some kind, and every single one ofthem, no matter how worthy they are, will feel an almostuncontrollable urge to nick something.

I did. Over the years I have been to hundreds of houses and havenever once felt the need to pocket a teaspoon or an inkwell. Butover a cup of tea in the palace’s music room, I was overcome with aHerculean bout of kleptomania. I had my eye on the harpsichord butanything would have done. A cup. A saucer.A milk jug, even.

Staff, I’m told, keep a watchful eye on visitors but what do you saywhen you see a leading Rotarian shove a royal teapot in hispocket? How on earth do you ask for it back, diplomatically? I mean,he’s going to know that you know that it didn’t get in his trousers byaccident.

And what’s more, when Denise Van Outen boasted that she’dnicked an ashtray while on a trip to the palace Mrs Queen couldn’tvery well prosecute. It would seem mean, somehow. The same goesfor the old biddies who pick flowers while at the garden parties.Even Prince Philip has never been heard to yell: ‘Oy, Ethel! Leavethat orchid alone.’

Gravel, apparently, is what most people steal. Handfuls of it.Although my biggest problem with the loose shale that covers thecourtyard was resisting the urge to do a handbrake turn on it.

The worst thing, though, about living in the palace is the decor. TheQueen is the only person alive who watched that Michael Jackson

Queen is the only person alive who watched that Michael Jacksonshopping trip to Las Vegas and thought: ‘I’ve got one of thosevases.’

The whole thing is a symphony of gloomy portraits of unsmilingancestors with splashes of pure ostentation and gilt. In the maincorridor pink and gold Eltonesque sofas clash violently with thebright red carpets.

It’s a Neverland kind of Derry Irvine hell and, unlike anyone else, theQueen can’t watch an episode of Homefront and think: ‘Right. I’llknock through here, fit a natural wood floor, some Moroccan-stylescatter cushions and top it all off with a bit of rag-rolling on theceiling.’ She’s stuck with it.

She’s stuck with her job, too, endlessly waving and asking people tohand over the teapot. Of course, theoretically, she still has thepower to start a war, though His Tonyness is capable of doing thaton his own these days, and she can still dissolve Parliament.

This brings me on to my biggest point. Imagine having the power tosend that braying bunch of ne’er-do-wells from the Palace ofWestminster home, and not doing it.

Not even for a bit of fun, during a party. Whatever you may think ofthe Queen she has willpower, that’s for sure.

You may argue that the pain of being a queen is eased by her vastfortune. This may be true. But what can the poor dear spend it on?A speedboat? A Lamborghini? She’s not Victoria Beckham, youknow.

Some say she should be replaced with a president. But who, at acost to the nation of just 82p per person per year, is going to live inwhat amounts to Liberace’s wardrobe, and spend their days makingsmall talk with stuttering and sweaty two-bit Third World politicians

small talk with stuttering and sweaty two-bit Third World politicianswhose entourage is hell-bent on nicking the carpet?

You’d need to be mad to volunteer for all this. But then presidentsusually are.


Who Needs Abroad When You Can Holidayin Hythe?What a week. With the blossom in the trees and the sun on ourbacks, the nation kicked off its shoes, sat back and split its sides atphotographs of those holidaymakers in Italy, all cold and shiveringunder their umbrellas.

There was, however, a fly in the blueness of it all. Normally when thesun puts his hat on someone on the weather forecast will tell usprecisely how long we can spend outside without catching cancer.

This week, however, the Ministry of Misery came up with a new idea.On Wednesday it announced that the warm weather may causesmog in the south-east and that this may lead to breathingdifficulties.

Oh, for God’s sake. What kind of sad, friendless person peels backhis curtains on the sort of days we had last week and thinks: ‘Ohno’? Well matey, whoever you are, just because you spend allweekend in the darkest corner of your mother’s attic, downloadingphotographs of naked ladies, doesn’t mean we have to as well. Soget back to your internet and leave us alone.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Italy or France. And even in theland of the healthy and the home of the safe you aren’t warned onthe radio to stay indoors whenever it stops raining. What you getthere is: ‘It’s a beautiful morning in the Bay Area. We’re expectinghighs in the upper twennies. Here’s the J Geils Band.’

What we get is: ‘It’s a beautiful morning in the southeast. We’reexpecting thousands of people to choke to death. Stay indoors.Stay white. Here’s some Morrissey.’

However, despite the best endeavours of the killjoys, the pleasantweather did set me thinking. Was it right to laugh at the 1.8 millionpeople who’ve gone away for Easter? Can you really have a goodholiday here at home?

Those of you who spent Good Thursday in a jam are probablythinking: ‘No, you cannot.’ But actually, spending two hours in trafficlistening to the radio is better than spending two hours checking inat an airport. In a jam nobody wants to look in your shoes, forinstance.

There are some drawbacks, though. Wherever you go in Britainsome clown on a two-stroke microlight will spend the day 100 feetabove your head, battling pointlessly and noisily against a four-knotheadwind.

But let’s not forget that the Lonely Planet guide voted Britain themost beautiful island on earth.

There’s variety, too. Readers of the Sun can go to Blackpool orScarborough. The reader of the Independent can go to Wales, thereaders of Taxi magazine can go to Margate. Readers of theObserver, all of them actually, can take their Saabs to one of thosewooden fishing cottages on Dungeness, where they can spend aweek pretending to be Derek Jarman and having angst about thenuclear power station.

And readers of the Daily Mail? Well, they can go to their cellars toavoid falling house prices, murderers and whatever plague it isthat’s going to kill them this week.

So what about you, readers of the Sunday Times? Well, obviously,you have Norfolk and Rock to play with, but if you fancy somethingdifferent – very different – may I suggest the Imperial Hotel in

Hythe?

As is usual in British south-coast provincial hotels, the heating wasturned up far too high, the carpets were far too patterned and thechef had ideas far above his station. The menu was full of thingsnestling on other things.

But don’t be fooled. Don’t think this was just another British hotelthat threw in the towel when cheap package holidays started in the1960s. No, this place presented me with one of the most bewitchingnights of my entire travelling life.

The dining room, for instance, featured an altar – and, on the farwall, some curtains, behind which, I can only presume, there was anoven. So when the older guests, so prevalent here on the southcoast, drop dead in the soup, they can be cremated on site. ‘Youcheck in. We check you out.’ Maybe that’s the Imperial’s motto.

I must also mention our waitress. She was a pretty little thing wholaughed, and I mean likea drain, whenever anyone spoke to her.

After dinner she took me into a broom cupboard – I felt a BorisBecker moment coming on but sadly it was not to be. She needed toexplain, she said, that she was joyful because she has Jesus ChristOur Saviour inside her. Lucky old Jesus.

The bar was full of dead pensioners, a group who said they were‘tri-service people’ but were actually 00 agents, and all the Germanbaddies from Die Hard, who’d arrived on the lawn in a helicopter.

I therefore went to the lounge and guess what I found? If it hadbeen a Roman orgy or a Ku Klux Klan meeting, I wouldn’t have beensurprised, but in fact there were 50 soldiers from the Chinese armyin there. You don’t find that sort of thing in Siena.

So will I be taking my summer holiday at the Imperial? No, not really.The Lonely Planet is right to say Britain is the most beautiful islandon earth. But only as a place to live.

The most beautiful island to take a holiday on is Corsica.


We Have the Galleries, But Where’s theArt?The opening of Charles Saatchi’s new gallery in London seems tohave highlighted a problem. There are now so many galleriesdotted around Britain that there simply isn’t enough art to go round.

We saw this first with Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, which sits likea big golden hat on the unkempt head of this otherwiseunremarkable industrial city in northern Spain. It’s an astonishingbuilding, which is a good thing because the exhibits inside aren’tastonishing at all.

When I went a couple of yearsago there was a triangle, a very smallmaze and a frock. Further research has revealed that the mostpopular exhibition ever staged there was for customisedmotorcycles.

Now the disease has spread. All over Britain the dark satanic mills,which fell into disrepair when the empire crumbled, are being turnedinto art galleries. That may sound like a good idea at a meeting. Butexactly how much art is there in Gateshead? Or Walsall?

Oh sure, rural pubs often encourage us to patronise ‘local artists’.So we pat them on the head, call their work ‘amazing’, ask wherethey got the idea to paint with their eyes closed and then run for ourlives.

The fact is that most of Britain’s art is hung in the vaults ofJapanese banks.

The rest is at the Tate or the National. So while it’s jolly noble to turna former duster factory in Glossop into a gleaming blend of low-voltage lighting and holly flooring, there is going to be a problem

voltage lighting and holly flooring, there is going to be a problemfinding stuff to put on the walls.

The curators could turn to New York artist Maurizio Cattelan, whoserecent works include a life-size sculpture of the Pope flattened by ameteorite that has supposedly crashed through the roof of thegallery. Then there’s his replica of the Vietnam war memorial inWashington, DC, inscribed not with the names of dead soldiers butwith every defeat suffered by the England football team.

There is, however, a problem with Cattelan’s work. Next month,someone is expected to pay more than £200,000 for his 8-footrabbit suspended by its ears. Were the buyer to be Walsall BoroughCouncil, it’s fair to expect some kind of voter backlash.

As I keep saying, everything these days is measured in terms ofhow many baby incubators or teachers it could have bought. As aresult, if a council spends £200,000 on a dangling bunny it’s goingto find itself in the newspapers, that’s for sure.

Even Saatchi struggles. Obviously unable to secure a nice paintingof some bluebells by a local artist, he has filled his new gallery withall sorts of stuff that to the untrained eye is food, bedding, wasteand pornography.

At the opening party he got 200 people to lie naked outside thedoors and such was the unusualness of it all that Helen Baxendale,the actress, said she was nervous about talking to Tracey Emin ‘incase she wees on me or something’.

Inside guests could feast their eyes on a pickled shark, a room half-filled with sump oil and a severed cow’s head full of maggots andflies.

The high-profile nature of all this provides some hope for theowners of provincial galleries – they need only trawl their local

owners of provincial galleries – they need only trawl their localbutchers and fishmongers to fill half the space – but it’s not so goodfor you and me.

The trouble is that thanks to Saatchi – and, to a certain extent,Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – there’s a sense that you can putanything on your walls at home and it will do. But it won’t.

I, for instance, have a very nice little picture in my sitting room. It’s ofsome cows on a misty morning by a river. I know this because it waspainted by someone whose deftness with a brush meant he couldrepresent cows and mist and a river.

Unfortunately, it gives off a sense that I’m not moving with the times.So really I should take it down and nail one of my dogs to the wallinstead. Or maybe I should frame the Sunday joint and put that up.

It’s hard to know what to do. I could go for a picture of Myra Hindleythat was painted using the dingle-berries from a sheep. But it wouldalmost certainly cost £150,000.

With my flat in London I went for a look that’s clean and clinical andminimalistic. Bare wooden floors and bare walls painted in one ofthose new colours that’s nearly Barbie pink but not quite. If youwere to photograph it and put it in a design magazine, it would lookfantastic and people would pay £5 to come and look round.

But every time I walk through the door I always think: ‘God, thisplace could do with some furniture.’ The people living belowprobably think it could do with some carpets, too.

There’s another problem. It’s all very well subscribing to the ‘design’phase we are going through at the moment, but soon there will beanother phase and then you’ll have to throw away your hardwoodfloors and start again.

It isn’t so bad when your trousers become dated because it’s only£50 for a new pair. But when you need a whole new house, that’s adifferent story. Which is why my misty cows are staying. Real art,like real jeans, never goes out of fashion. You’ll never hear anyonesay: ‘That Mona Lisa, she’s so last week.’


You Think SARS is Bad? There’s WorseOut ThereAs viruses go, SARS is pretty pathetic. It’s hard to catch and notvery powerful.

Despite the horror stories, 90 per cent of those who becomeinfected go on to make a full recovery. On balance, then, it’sprobably sensible for schools in Britain to stay open and foraeroplanes to carry on circling the globe.

However, what if it were Ebola? Since this filovirus was first identifiedin 1976 it has become a bit of a joke. Reports at the time said itdissolved fat and lots of Hurley/Posh surgically enhanced womenthought it might be a fun alternative to liposuction. I’m just as bad.Every time I go to the doctor I always tell him I’ve caught Ebola justfor a laugh.

Actually, it isn’t very funny. It attacks your immune system – butunlike HIV, which lets something else come along and kill you, Ebolakeeps on going, charging through your body with the coldness of ashark and the ruthlessness of a Terminator.

First your blood begins to clot, clogging up your liver, kidney, lungs,brain, the lot. Then it goes for the collagen – the glue that holdsyour body together – so that your skin starts to fall off. Usually yourtongue falls out, your eyes fill with blood and your internal organsliquefy before oozing out of your nose. Except for your stomach.You vomit that out of your mouth.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Ebola eats you alive and then, tomake sure you don’t die in vain, it finishes you off with a hugeepileptic fit, splashing eight pints of massively infectious blood allover anyone within 20 feet or so.

over anyone within 20 feet or so.

Nobody dies of Ebola with dignity and very few victims get better.Unlike SARS, the most virulent strain of Ebola, called Zaire, kills 90per cent of those who get it.

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is noEbola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite atwenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to findwhere it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it’s a spider ora space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obviousreason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes andhis stomach in a bag.

Tests have shown that the virus is simple and ancient. It hasprobably been hanging around since the days when Rio de Janeirowas joined at the hip to Cameroon. Over the years, therefore, it’sreasonable to assume that it has killed thousands of people. Butbecause it kills so fast it could never travel. Now, though, with Zaireconnected to the worldwide web of airline routes, an infected personcould reach London or New York before he knew he was ill.

We saw this with Aids. Who knows how long this had been hangingaround in the jungle, playing jiggy-jiggy with monkeys? When theypaved the Kinshasa Highway that bisects Africa from east to westand the trucks started to flow, Aids burst into the world and, 25years later, about 22 million people were dead.

It may be that in years to come, when Aids has killed more peoplethan the First and Second World Wars combined, historians will lookupon the building of this road as the most significant event of thetwentieth century.

HIV, remember, is another pathetic virus. It can live for only twentyseconds in the air, it travels from person to person only if they

seconds in the air, it travels from person to person only if theyengage in vigorous sex, and it takes ten years to do to a personwhat Ebola manages to do in ten days.

SARS has shown us just how devastating the jet engine can be as acarrier. A doctor gets poorly in a Hong Kong hotel and within weeksthere are outbreaks all over the world. Even Canada got itself onthe news.

Like HIV, SARS is also difficult to catch. Ebola is easy. In the 1990sscientists in America put an infected monkey in a cage on one sideof a room and a healthy monkey in a cage on the other. Two weekslater the healthy monkey was dead.

Following a spate of Hollywood films, most people believe thehuman race is at greatest risk of annihilation from a giant meteoriteor some kind of religious nuclear war. But if Ebola ever gets on aplane, experts say that 90 per cent of us will be dead within sixmonths. It is known in America, where they are good at names, as a‘slate wiper’.

This is why I’m slightly nervous about the world’s reaction to SARS.We like to think that governments have contingency plans for everyconceivable disaster. But I got the impression over recent weeksthat a lot of people have been sitting around in rooms saying ‘ooh’and ‘crikey’ and ‘you can’t do that – think of the shareholders’.

What we need is a scheme that would allow scientists and medicalexperts to impose, at a moment’s notice, a total ban on all flightsand a global curfew. But who would run such a thing? The WorldHealth Organisation doesn’t even have big enough teeth to take abite out of that political colossus Canada.

The Americans? I fear not. Any disease that has a fondness foreating stomachs would head there first. Besides, if they can’t find

eating stomachs would head there first. Besides, if they can’t findSaddam and Osama, what chance do they have of findingsomething so small that there could be a million on the full stop atthe end of this sentence.

So it’s the United Nations then. We’ve had it.

Sunday 4 May 2003

Mandela Just Doesn’t Deserve HisPedestalIt seemed like a foregone conclusion. A panel of arty types wasasked by a local council whether a statue of Nelson Mandela shouldbe erected in Trafalgar Square, right under the portals of the SouthAfrican embassy.

Astonishingly, however, this week they said that no, it shouldn’t. Nowa selection of Labour MPs and Ken Livingstone have written to theGuardian to express their dismay.

I’m rather pleased. If we’re going to have a Nelson theme inTrafalgar Square, I would rather see a bronze of Elvis wannabeRicky Nelson, or the old tax dodger himself, Willie Nelson. Actually,come to think of it, what I’d really like is a stone immortalisation ofthe Nelson’s Nelson, the Brazilian racing driver Nelson Piquet.

As you can see, my objections are not based on jingoisticprinciples. There are 30,000 statues in London and numberedamong these are Gandhi in Tavistock Square and Abraham Lincolnin Parliament Square. I seem to remember there’s a bronze ofOscar Wilde kicking around somewhere, too.

Also, I have no problem with any attempt to erect some powerfulsymbol about racial harmony slap bang in the middle of what wasonce the centre of the empire.

But if this is the goal, then I think we might be better off with a statueof Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. It could even be a musicalstatue serenading passers-by with the duo’s 1982 hit, ‘Ebony andIvory’.

I have to be honest. I have a problem with Mandela. I know that hehas become a symbol of democracy’s triumph over evil and a heroto oppressed people everywhere, and I’m sure that Livingstone andCo. are right to say that millions of people would like to see this‘great statesman’ immortalised for all time in the middle of London.

But he’s not Gandhi, you know. You may like what he represents – Ido – but if you peer under the halo of political correctness thatbathes him in a golden glow of goodness you’ll find that the manhimself is a bit dodgy.

Back in the early 1960s he was the one who pushed the ANC intoarmed conflict. He was known back then as the Black Pimpernel.And his second marriage was to Winnie, who’s now a convictedfraudster and thief with, we’re told, a penchant for Pirelli necklaces.

Furthermore, since his release from prison and his eventual rise tothe presidency Mandela has had some extraordinary things to sayabout world affairs.

He’s deeply concerned, for instance, about the plight of one of theLockerbie bombers and has expressed support for both Gadaffi andCastro.

Indeed, he has singled out Cuba, praising it for its human rights andliberty. I’m sorry – what human rights, what liberty? Perhaps heshould go to the Cohiba night club and ask one of the twelve-year-old prostitutes which way her parents voted.

Once, while defending his decision to share a stage with threePuerto Rican terrorists who shot and wounded five US congressmenin 1954, Mandela said he supported anyone who was fighting forself-determination. The IRA, the Chechens, Shining Path? What if Istarted a movement to bring about independence for ChippingNorton; what if I blew up council offices in Oxford and shot a few

Norton; what if I blew up council offices in Oxford and shot a fewpolicemen – could I count on Mandela’s support?

What of the people who hijacked those airliners on 11 September?They would almost certainly have argued that one of their goals wasself-rule for Palestine. So does he think their actions were justified?Confusingly, he doesn’t.

I simply don’t understand why the Nobel academy gave him a peaceprize or why Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh gave him a newgarden. And I don’t see why he should be given a statue inTrafalgar Square, either. If we’re after someone who stands up forthe oppressed, what about Jesus? I feel fairly sure that he neverblew up a train.

However, what I would like to see is something to commemorateFrank Whittle. Here we have a man whose invention – the jet engine– turned the world into a village. And by bringing us closer together,who knows how many conflicts he has helped us to avoid?

More than that, who knows what might have happened in theSecond World War, if only the air ministry had listened? For yearafter year the ministry ignored Whittle’s invention, even refusing topay a £5 fee to renew his patent in the 1930s.

Of course, in the latter stages of the war, when it saw jet planesshooting down V-2 rockets, it staged a serious about-face. Whittlewas knighted, given a CBE, a KBE and£100,000. He was alsopromoted to air commodore. But he knew that Britain could havehad jets before the war broke out and that, as a result, millions oflives could have been saved. In disgust he went to live in America,where he died just seven years ago.

Coventry remembers its most famous son by having a statue in thetown of Lady Godiva. I’m told that Whittle has a bust in the RAF

town of Lady Godiva. I’m told that Whittle has a bust in the RAFClub in Piccadilly but that’s not good enough. He should be inTrafalgar Square. And it won’t cost that much, either, since he wasonly 5 feet tall.

Sunday 11 May 2003

In Search of Lost Time, One Chin and aLifeWhen I was a child time used to pass with the languid sultriness of asaxophone solo. Every day the sun would amble through thecloudless sky as though it were being propelled by the gentlest ofsummer breezes. And then, in the winter, perfect crisp snow wouldsettle and not melt for what felt like 40 years.

At school I remember spending those long, warm evenings listeningto those long, warm songs on Dark Side of the Moon.

One of the tracks seemed to suggest that time passed quickly andthat unless I got out of my chair, took off my Akai headphones anddid something with my life, ten years would flash past and I’d still be‘kicking around on a piece of ground in my home town, waiting forsomeone or something to show me the way-e-yay’.

What a lot of nonsense, I thought. We received no drug educationback then but we didn’t need it. Pink Floyd were a living, breathingexample of what recreational pharmaceuticals did to the mind. Tenyears, as any teenage boy knows, is a century.

Pretty soon, I was 23 and time was still ‘flexing like a whore’, floatinground and round as though it were a seed pod caught in thegurgling eddy of a mountain beck. If anything, there was even moretime in my twenties than there had been in my childhood, largelybecause I wasted so little of it by sleeping.

However, when you get to 33, everything changes. Time straps a jetpack to its back, lights the afterburners and sets off at Mach 3. Thesun moves across the sky as though God’s got his finger on the fastforward button. Blink and you can miss a whole month.

This was hammered home on Thursday night, when I met up with adozen friends for a pizza at a favourite old haunt of ours inWandsworth. We used to go there a lot, in the early nineties, which,we all agreed, seemed like only yesterday.

That’s weird, isn’t it? No one ever says when they’re twenty: ‘Gosh.It only seems like yesterday that I was ten.’ But my God, the timefrom when your dreams are smashed and you realise you’ll neverbe a fighter pilot to the moment when your body starts to swell upand fall to pieces really does go by with the vim and vigour of aKylie song.

When I was 20 my friends and I went to the pub. When I was 30 westill went to the pub. Nothing ever happened. Nothing ever changed.But then, all hell broke loose.

One of us moved to France, one died, one divorced, one has takenup golf, one (me) has grown six new chins, one has had a lung andmost of his bottom removed, one is in a never-ending custody battlewith his ex-wife, who seems to have been taken by the breeze ofinsanity, and two were moved from their penthouse flat by socialservices to secure accommodation in Uxbridge… for absolutely noreason at all.

Ten years ago we used to leave that restaurant whenever we ranout of money or, more usually, when the cellar ran out of wine. OnThursday we all left at eleven because we were tired.

I woke up at eight the following morning to find I had three morechins and a terrible hangover. And by the time that had goneanother 30 years had whizzed by.

I cannot believe how fast time goes now. I leave the Top Gearstudio, write this, say hello to the children and then I’m back in the

studio again. It’s like God has taken the job of marking time fromOscar Peterson and given it to the mad drummer Cozy Powell.

It’s amazing. On Saturday afternoons we used to play Risk, simplyto pass the time until the pub opened again. I had the space in mylife to read books and not only listen to Pink Floyd songs but workout what they meant. I drove fast, only for fun. Now I drive fast tokeep up with the clock.

I read with despair about people who give up London thinking thatwhen they’re far from the Tube and the expectant wink of acomputer’s cursor they can float through the days like dandelionseeds. It doesn’t work because ‘where you are’ isn’t the problem. It’s‘when you are’.

In the olden days you got married in your teens, had children inyour twenties, made a few quid in your thirties, enjoyed it in yourforties and fifties and then retired in your sixties.

Now, you do nothing in your teens, nothing in your twenties and bythe time you’re 40 you’re on the employment scrapheap, a seven-chinned hasbeen with a spent mind and man-breasts. This meansyou have to cram your whole life into your thirties.

And that’s why it passes at 2,000 mph.

Well, I’m 43 now and I want the saxophone back. I want to lie on myback, chewing grass, thinking of nothing but what my final wordsmight be.

My dad did that and came up with: ‘Son, you’ve made me proud.’Adam Faith kept on charging and ended up with: ‘Channel 5 is alls***, isn’t it.’

An apology. Last week I said that jets were shooting down V-2rockets at the end of the Second World War. Many people wrote to

rockets at the end of the Second World War. Many people wrote tosay it was V-1s. I should have checked, but I didn’t have time. Sorry.

Sunday 18 May 2003

In Search of a Real Garden at the ChelseaShowEvery week I strap myself into a monstrously powerful car and hurtleround a test track in a blaze of tyre smoke and noise. It’s a constantbattle with the laws of physics, and that’s a dangerous game to play.One day, inevitably, it’ll end in tears.

Still, in a good week the television programme that results attracts3.7 million viewers, making it the second-most watched show onBBC2.

Interestingly, and rather annoyingly, we’re beaten by Gardeners’World, in which a man called Monty Don moves soil from one placeto another and gets all excited about his new compost heap. What’smore, so far as I can tell, he speaks mostly in Latin.

We see a similar sort of thing with live events. While the vibrantLondon Motor Show, with its bikini-clad lovelies, coughed up bloodfor a few years and then died completely, the Chelsea Flower Showcontinues to be a huge attraction. This year, it even managed toattract me.

I needed a fountain and perhaps a statue for a bit of garden thatI’ve just paved.

I like paving. It doesn’t need mowing and unlike grass, which isvindictive, it doesn’t give me hay fever on purpose.

Unfortunately, at Chelsea this year, the most impressive waterfeature on display was the sky, so everyone was forced into a tentfull of flowers. Flowers bore me.

They do nothing for 50 weeks of the year and then on the other twothey continue to do nothing because you planted them somewherethat was too hot, too shady, too high up or too near sea level. Andthe soil was wrong too. And the wind.

Happily, the people weren’t boring at all. At a motor show you queuewith men called Ron and Derek for a pint of brown in a plastic glass.At Chelsea they give you champagne every time you stop movingand you get to see Cherie Blair in real life.

I was also interested to note that the whole event was quite smart.It’s all sponsored by bankers on the basis, I suppose, that if peopleare interested in shrubs at £3,000 a pop, they might have a bit offloating lolly that needs licking into shape.

However, because it’s smart, everyone was in a suit, which meant itwas hard to spot the bankers coming. Is it Rowan Atkinson? Is itPrince Andrew? Oh bloody hell, it’s a bloke from Merrill Lynch withnews of his Swiss supersava scheme.

I escaped by seeking out the garden that had been done bypeoplein prison.I don’tget this. We’re forever being told thatprisoners are only allowed out of their cells for a moment’s man-lovein the showers, yet every year at Chelsea one nick or another turnsup with a full-scale model of Babylon.

How, when they’re not allowed outside? And where do they get thesoil? No really, if I were one of the guards, I’d have a look under thestove because I bet they’d find Charles Bronson down there in‘Harry’, the Great Escape tunnel.

Eventually it stopped raining and I went outside to look at thestatues. Why are they all of Venus? How come every single sculptorsits down with a block of stone and thinks: ‘I know. I’ll do that birdwith no arms.’ Why can’t someone make a statue of Stalin? Or Keith

with no arms.’ Why can’t someone make a statue of Stalin? Or KeithMoon?

And if they do an animal, it’s always an otter. Come on. You’reartists. Use your imagination. If it has to be an otter, make it Ring ofBright Water ’ s Mij, with a shovel in the back of its head. In fact,why not make a statue of Hitler beating an otter to death. That’ssomething I’d buy.

Then I got to the fountains. Oh deary me. Some of them were veryclever. The silver and purple waves with a gentle cascade tipplingdown their flanks were marvellous and will undoubtedly look goodwhen they end up where they belong: in the foyer of abusinessmen’s hotel at Frankfurt airport.

The thingis, I like a fountainto roar, not tinkle. What I want in myback garden is the Niagara on Viagra, and despite extensivesearching, Chelsea couldn’t help.

In fact, I saw nothing there that had any relevance at all.Istoppedfora momentto admire one flowerbed that was filled withcrushed blue glass. It looked wonderful, a cheerful alternative to thedreary brownness of soil or bark.

I was just about to plunge my hand into the blueness for a feel whena man leapt out of nowhere. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he warned, showingme his hands, which looked like they’d been through a bacon slicer.So what possible use is glass, then, as a substitute for mud? Unlessyou want to chop your dog’s legs off?

I went home that night a bit dejected. And my mood darkened when Ireached the house. Two years ago I planted a mixed hedge toseparate my paddock from the road. It was just getting going, thelittle whips had become mini toddler trees.

But some berk in an untaxed, uninsured Sierra had lost control onthe corner and smashed the whole thing to pieces. Damn the boyracers. Damn them all to hell.

I feel sure the bods at Chelsea could advise me on a new hedge. Abonsai perhaps, which needs watering with Chablis every fifteenminutes and grows best if set in dappled shade on a bed of uncutdiamonds.

Sunday 25 May 2003

To Boldly Go Where Nobody’s Tried aDumb Record BeforeIt’s starting to look like Australia maintains a modern navy only topluck hapless British explorers from their tiny upturned boats.

Last week an Aussie frigate sailed thousands of miles to rescue twochaps who were attempting to row across the Indian Ocean. No, Idon’t know why either, but as far as I can tell, one of them got aheadache from a freak wave and decided to call it a day.

And who can forget the epic tale of Tony Bullimore who started toeat himself after his yacht capsized in the Southern Ocean. Luckily,he’d only gnawed his way through half of one hand when HMASAdelaide steamed into view.

It all sounds very Boy’s Own but the Australian taxpayers arestarting to get a bit cross, and I can’t say I blame them. Their navywas involved in the recent bout of Middle Eastern fisticuffs and hasa torrid time patrolling the waters off Darwin in an endless searchfor desperate Indonesians who’ve been drifting on cardboard forfourteen years with nothing to eat but their fingernails.

Then, every fifteen minutes, they have to break off and sail 1,500miles in rotten weather, and at vast expense, to rescue some weird-beard Englishman who’s down to his last Vesta.

The problem is that humans have already climbed the highestmountains and sailed on their own through the wildest and lonelieststretches of ocean. But though the records have gone, the world isstill full of Chichesters and Hillarys and Amundsens.

As a result, these people have to think of stupider things to quenchtheir need for a spot of frostbitten glory. So, they insert a few sub-

their need for a spot of frostbitten glory. So, they insert a few sub-clauses into the record and set off from Margate to become theFirst Person Ever to Pogo-Stick Round the World – Backwards.

Did you see base camp in the Himalayas last week? It was asmorgasbord of dopamine and lunacy, with people in silly outfitsfrom all four corners of the globe. ‘Yes, I’m attempting to be the firstChinese person to climb Everest in a tutu.’

‘Oh really. I shall be the second Peruvian ever to go up there in ascuba suit but I’m hoping to be the first not to come back downagain.’

Then we have a chap called Pen Hadow. Plainly, it’s in his biologicalmake-up to have icicles in his eyes, so he has to go to the Arctic.But what record is left to beat? We’ve had the first person to driveto the North Pole, the first person to walk to the North Pole unaidedand, probably, the first to jog there, from Russia, in a kilt. But Penwasn’t going to be defeated before he’d even set off.

So he pored over the record books and spotted an opening.Eureka! He would become the First Person Ever to Trek to theGeographic North Pole from Canada, Unaided.

This meant skiing, clambering and swimming through open water,while towing a 300-lb sled. But he made it, a point verified by thetourists who will have watched him arrive from the warmth of theirhelicopters and their cruise ships.

Sadly, though, he wasn’t able to make it back and, as a result, somepoor Canadian pilot who was just sitting down to a nice moosesandwich with his family had to effect a daring and spectacularairborne rescue.

This is my biggest beef about explorers today. When Shackleton’sboat was crushed by the ice, he didn’t think: ‘Crikey, it’s a bit nippy

boat was crushed by the ice, he didn’t think: ‘Crikey, it’s a bit nippyout. Let’s get the Argies on the sat phone and have them bring adestroyer.’ No, he ate his dogs, sang some songs, rowed like billy-oand emerged from the event an enduring national hero.

Now compare this with the case of Simon Chalk. Last year he had tobe rescued when his rowing boat bumped into a whale. And now heis attempting to become the Youngest Person Ever to Row fromAustralia to an Island Nobody’s Ever Heard Of, On His Own.

I know someone has already rowed the Pacific so I have no ideawhy we’re supposed to get excited about some bloke who’s rowing amuch shorter distance, and in some style by all accounts. Accordingto the BBC: ‘He will run out of drinks on day 85 and after that he willhave to survive on water.’

I’m sorry. What drinks? Washe mixing himself a little gin and Frenchafter a hard day’s tugging?

This sounds like the kind of record I’d like to attempt: The MostLuxurious Crossing of the World’s Smallest, Warmest Ocean, EatingOnly Quail’s Eggs and Celery Salt.

Meanwhile, I havea suggestion for allof you who are only happywhen you have gangrene and only feel alive when you’re less thanan inch from death. Stop messing around in your upturned bathtubsin the southern oceans. If you really have to perform endurancetrials at sea, do it near America.

Then when it all goes wrong, it’ll be the US Navy who’ll come to therescue.

And if an American naval vessel is employed picking up Mr Scott-Shackleton who was attempting to swim underwater from SanFrancisco to Tokyo, it won’t be able to rain cruise missiles down onwhatever unfortunate country George W. Bush has heard of that

whatever unfortunate country George W. Bush has heard of thatweek.

It’s win–win for Mr Templeman-Ffiennes. If he succeeds, hebecomes the First Person to Cross the Pacific on a Bicycle. If hefails, he saves the world.

Sunday 8 June 2003

Beckham’s Tried, Now It’s My Turn to Tamethe FansIf there’s any more fighting on the terraces, the England footballteam will not be allowed to take part in the Euro World OlympicChampionship Cup 2004.

This came as a bit of a surprise because I thought footballhooliganism had gone away.I thought the stands were all full offamilies saying things like ‘Ooh, look at Michael’s dribbling skills’ and‘Gosh, have you seen David’s new Alice band?’

But it seems not. Things are apparently so bad that PresidentBeckham addressed the nation recently. No, honestly, that’s what itsaid in the papers – that he ‘addressed the nation’ appealing forcalm in the run-up to whatever championship it is that we’re going tolose next.

It’s a good time then to pause a while and think a little bit about whypeople fight and how they might be stopped from doing so.

The other day I was staying in a northern town. I shan’t say whichone because the local newspaper will spend the next six monthspillorying me, so let’s call it Rotherhullcastlepool.

Anyway, opposite the hotel was a nightclub and outside that was alengthy queue of people who, despite the chill, appeared to be as-near-as-makes-no-difference naked.

It seemed odd queuing to get into a nightclub at 11 p.m. when,obviously, it was full. And it was going to stay full, surely. Nobodyleaves a nightclub at 11, not when the nearest one is 40 miles awayin Donfieldgowon-Trent.

I was wrong. Every few minutes two more lads would come flying outof the door in a flurry of fists and torn T-shirts. After they’d beencalmed down by some kicks from the bouncers, two more peoplewere allowed in.

I watched this for a while and began to speculate on what might becausing so many fights in there. Drink? Girls? Drugs? Gangsterism?I think not. I think the root cause of the problem was unintelligence.

I’m told that if all creatures were the same size, the lobster wouldhave the smallest brain. All it knows to do is eat and snap atsomething if its pint is spilled.

Well, this is what you find in northern nightclubs. Someone looks atyour girlfriend, you hit them. Someone looks at you, you hit them.With really stupid creatures, any stimulation whatsoever provokes alobster response.

My older children have the mental age of eight- and seven-year-olds, because they are eight and seven years old. So they hit eachother pretty much constantly. When the boy refuses to give his bigsister a Pringle, she doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to formulate areasoned argument. So she whacks him.

We see the same story in America. As a relatively new country, fullof relatively daft people, it doesn’t have the wisdom or theexperience to construct a sensible response. So when it’s prodded,it lashes out with its jets and its aircraft carriers.

I’ve never hit anyone. I may not have the mind of John Humphrys orthe nose of Stephen Fry, but even I, with my six O levels, know thatif I punch someone, they will punch me right back. And that,because this will hurt, it’s best in a tricky situation to run like hell.

Only once was this not an option. A girlfriend had been pinnedagainst the wall by a wiry, tattooed man whose speech was slurredby a combination of drink and being from Glasgow. He wanted verymuch for her to kiss him.

So what was I to do? The sensible answer was ‘nothing’ but I feareda terrible row when we got home so having weighed things up for awhile, I tapped the drunken Scotsman on the shoulder and said, aspolitely as possible: ‘Excuse me.’

He whirled round, his eyes full of fire and his hands balled intosteel-hard fists. But the blow never came. ‘Christ, you’re a bigbastard,’ he said, and ran off. It was the proudest moment of my life.

In fact, I have only ever been hit once. It was a big, rounded, fullyformed punch to the side of my head and it was landed by someonewho was Greek, right in front of two policemen. Who then arrestedme for being beaten up. Like I said. Daft as brushes, the lot of them.But would the Greek have punched me in the first place if nobodyhad been looking?

Are fights like the light in your fridge? Do they go on when nobodyelse is there? Or does there have to be an audience to both lightthe spark and then pull the opponents apart when things turn uglyand the claret starts to flow?

I’ve just been outside to speak with my builders who know aboutsuch things and apparently in all their years they’ve never heard ofwhat they call a ‘one-on-one’. Two blokes, jackets off, fighting tosettle something quietly round the back of the pub.

So if the England football team want to avoid trouble at futureevents they have to play without an audience, live or on television.And it’d probably be for the best if President Beckham, clean livingand well meaning though he may be, stops addressing the nation.

and well meaning though he may be, stops addressing the nation.

In fact it’s probably best if he leaves the nation altogether – beforesomeone kicks a boot into his other eye.

Sunday 15 June 2003

The Unhappiest People on Earth? You’dNever GuessIn a recent survey to find the happiest people in the world, thesuper-smug Swiss came out on top. Just 3.6 per cent of thepopulation realised that having a punctual bus service andsomeone else’s teeth are not the be all and end all of life and saidthey were dissatisfied with their lot.

Whatever. The most interesting finding is to be found at the bottomof the table: the country with the most unhappy people.

I would have gone for Niger. I went there once, to a small town in themiddle of nowhere called Agadez, and it was pretty damn close toeven Lucifer’s idea of hell on earth. You could almost taste thehopelessness and smell the despair. There were no crops to tendand no factories to work in.

There was a shower, around which the town had been built, Isuppose, and there was a table football game which seemed toamuse the children – even though the ball had been lost long ago.

It was a desperate place but, it seems, somewhere is worse.Finland, perhaps? It’s a sensible thought. You are apparently in theFirst World with your mobile phone and your pretty daughters butyou spend all winter being frozen to death and all summer beingeaten alive by mosquitoes the size of tractors.

I can’t imagine that I would be terribly happy living in Afghanistan,either, though I dare say there is some satisfaction in going to bedthinking: ‘Well, at least I wasn’t shot today.’

When you come to think about it, the list of countries where youhave an excuse to be unhappy is huge. I have never been to that

have an excuse to be unhappy is huge. I have never been to thatfeatureless moonscape that’s now called Somethingikstan but I can’timagine it’s a barrel of laughs. And I’m not sure I would like it inBrazil, either, having to walk around in a thong to demonstrate that Ihad nothing about my person worth stealing.

Then there’s that swathe of misery that stretches along theKinshasa Highway in the middle of Africa. A land of flies, starvationand HIV.

A land that undermines a British social worker’s idea of poverty.However, the poll found that the people who are less satisfied withlife than anyone else are… drum roll here… the Italians.

Oh, now you mention it, it’s obvious. Whiling away those long, warmsummer evenings in the Tuscan hills with some cheese and a bottleor two of Vernaccia di San Gimignano. La dolce vita? It’s Italian for‘the ungrateful bastards’.

Even if we poke about in Italy’s dark and secret places, we don’t findmuch to complain about. The Mafia has been on the wane for thepast ten years, and how can anyone complain about SilvioBerlusconi’s alleged corruption when they themselves need abackhander to get out of bed in the morning.

Besides, our prime minister is much worse. He has made a completehash of everything and now he has started attacking cross-dressers, sacking men for wearing tights in the House of Lords.Despite this and the drizzle and the awful pub food, only 8.5 percent of us say we’re unhappy.

What’s more, while extremism is on the rise in Britain, it’s now adamp squib in Italy. With immigrants making up just 2.2 per cent ofthe population there, the far right cannot get much of a toehold andwhile there are a few communists dotted around here and there,

while there are a few communists dotted around here and there,they tend to be one-cal Bolsheviks. Certainly it’s been years sincethere was a really good fist fight in parliament.

Italy’s youngsters complain, apparently, about having to live athome until they are 72 but that’s because they spend all theirmoney on suits and coffee and Alfa Romeos rather than mortgages.

Of course, I can see that there are drawbacks to life in Italy. It mustbe annoying to have to post your letters in Switzerland if you wantthem to stand any chance of arriving, and I would quickly becomebored with being killed on the autostrada every day.

Then there’s the problem of your wife. One day, you know withabsolute certainty, you will come home from work to find that theravishing beauty you married and said goodbye to that morning iswaddling up the street in a black sack with breasts like six sacks ofpotatoes.

Plus, we think the Germans have no sense of humour, but Hansdoes at least find some things funny – people falling over onbanana skins and Benny Hill, for instance.

Luigi, on the other hand, doesn’t even laugh at bottoms. In acountry where style is everything and la bella figura dictates whatyou eat, what you wear and how much you drink, there is no roomfor the helplessness of mirth. As a result, there’s no such thing asEduardo Izzardio or Torre di Fawlty.

I don’t think this is quite enough, though. Worrying about your wifeballooning and not being able to laugh at your unreliable postalservice are not the end of the world, and having a dodgy primeminister is normal.

STOP PRESS: I’ve just read the result of another survey which saysBritain is one of the most dishonest countries in the world. So when

Britain is one of the most dishonest countries in the world. So when91.5 per cent of us said we were happy, plainly we were lying.

Sunday 22 June 2003

Welcome to Oafsville: It’s Any Town NearYouThe other night a man from the Campaign to Protect Rural Englandwent on the news to say that housing estates in Ledbury are justthe same as estates everywhere else and that all traces of localcharacter are being lost.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the executive homes over his shoulder,‘we could be anywhere from Welwyn Garden City to Milton Keynes.’

‘Pah!’ I scoffed, reaching for the remote control. ‘What’s he want?All houses in Somerset to be made from mead and freshlycarbonated village idiots? And all houses in Cheshire to be built outof gold and onyx?’

I agree that Bryant and Barratt charge through the countryside withthe destructive force of a double-barrelled shotgun, and I welcomeany move that eats into their profit margins. If they are forced tomake houses in Barnsley out of coal, that’s fine by me.

But having spent the week on a mammoth tour of England, I canassure you that there are far bigger problems to be addressed. Iwould go so far as to say that today provincial Britain is probablyone of the most depressing places on earth.

Of course, there are worse places, places where you can starve todeath or be eaten by flies. But this is a wealthy country with manywidescreen television sets, and that’s what makes it all sodepressing: the sense that it could be so much better.

It’s not the villages or the countryside that are wrong. It’s the towns,with their pedestrian precincts and the endless parade of charityshops and estate agents.

shops and estate agents.

At night boys, with their baggy trousers and their big shoes, screamup and down the high street in their souped-up Vauxhall Novas.There is nothing you want to see. Nothing you want to do.

You wade knee-deep through a sea of discarded styrofoam trayssmeared with bits of last night’s horseburger to your overheatedchintzy hotel where, in exchange for £75, they give you a roomwhere you can’t sleep because of the constant background hum ofpeople coupling or being sick outside.

It’s almost as though every council in the land has become soengrossed with their war on the car that they spend all their timeand money on speed humps and traffic-calming pots of geraniums.They seem to have lost sight of what the town is for: shopping,chatting, being a pack animal.

There are exceptions, usually towns and cities with universities,such as Oxford, but for the most part urban Britain is utterly devoidof any redeeming feature whatsoever.

And that’s before we get to the people. Who are they, with theirfaces like pastry and their legs like sides of beef? And what on earthdo they say to the barber to end up with such stupid hair?

They come from nothing, live a life enlivened only by a twice-yearlyvisit to some hairdresser who takes the mickey, and then they die soquietly that they’re not even remembered with a plaque on a parkbench.

I’m not kidding. In the Third World you will see hopelessness etchedonto people’s faces but in provincial Britain it’s gormlessness.

In the papers and at your house people discuss the euro and Iraq.But you get the sense that in Britain’s town centres they simply don’t

But you get the sense that in Britain’s town centres they simply don’tcare about anything. They drink, they eat, they mate, then they die.They might as well be spiders.

Scottish Courage, a brewery, is to be commended for launching anew type of drink to ease the misery. It’s a bottle of Kronenbourgsold with a shot of absinthe, a bright green hallucinogen that is 50%proof.

Banned by many countries throughout the civilised world, thoughnot the Czech Republic and Britain, it was a favourite tipple for allthe maddest artists. Van Gogh was reported to have drunk the stuffbefore cutting off his ear. Oscar Wilde said: ‘After the first glass, yousee things as you wish they were. After the second, you see thingsas they are not.’

This then is the perfect solution for life in provincial Britain today.One glass and you imagine you’re not in Hastings at all. After thesecond you imagine that you are in fact in St Tropez and that themonosyllabic fizzy-haired girl you’ve just pulled won’t give yousomething nasty to remember her by. After the third, your hair startsto look normal.

Experts say that mixing lager and absinthe is like drinking NightNurse and Ovaltine and that its sole purpose is to get you drunk. Sowhat? I see nothing wrong with that.

All over northern Europe people drink to get drunk, but in Reykjavik,the biggest drinking city anywhere, they don’t come out of the clubsfor a vomit and a fight.

In Stockholm the city centre is not buried under a styrofoammountain every morning.

I do not understand why this should be so here. Maybe, deep down,there’s a sense that Britain had fulfilled its obligations to the world

there’s a sense that Britain had fulfilled its obligations to the worldby 1890 and that now we’re like a nation of spent matches, servingout our time in IT or by changing the crabby sheets at the localoverheated hotel.

Whatever, I certainly have no answers. But building speed humpscertainly won’t help. And nor, I suspect, will worrying about the gableends on houses in Ledbury.

Sunday 29 June 2003

If Only My Garden Grew As Well As theHair in My EarsThere are many signs of middle age: hair growing out of your ears,a waistband that will not stop expanding no matter what you put inyour mouth and an increasing bewilderment at the noises made byRadio 1.

But the seminal moment when you know for sure that you havebecome old is when you look out of your bedroom window and say:‘Ooh good, it’s raining.’ This means you are more interested in yourplants looking good than getting a tan and looking good yourself.

For 43 years I have sneezed my way through the British summer,swigging from bottles of Piriton and gorging on handfuls of Zirtec.But hay fever has never dampened my enthusiasm for those lazydays in the garden, listening to men surge by on their motorbikes.

Mainly this is because I’ve never really had a garden in theaccepted sense of the word. Too much sun and too little chalk in thesoil have little or no effect on rubble and weeds. Now, however, witha veritable forest growing out of my ears, I have become interestedin maybe having a herbaceous border here and a weeping pearthere. So I was interested to read about the olive trees of southernItaly. In the war so many were chopped down for firewood that thegovernment imposed a ban, saying they could not be uprootedwithout permission from Mussolini.

When the war ended the law was never repealed, so the trees grewolder and older.

They became fat and tufts of hair began to appear from their knots.What’s more, the fruit they produced became worse and worse tothe point where it could be used only in paraffin lamps.

the point where it could be used only in paraffin lamps.

Then along came Charlie Dimmock. Suddenly, everyone in northernEurope decided they would like a century-old olive tree in theirgarden. A booming black market was the result, with Bavarianbankers paying up to £3,500 for a ‘gnarled designer’ tree to enliventheir Munich roof terrace.

Inevitably the tree huggers are up in arms and, for once, I’m withthem. What’s the point of paying £3,500 for something that Iguarantee will be dead within six months?

This is the one thing I’ve learnt during my short spell as a gardener:everything dies. Two weeks ago I spent £500 on a selection ofplants for my conservatory after the last lot were killed by scaleinsect. On Sunday I went to London for the day, and when I camehome at night it looked as if the American Air Force had beenthrough the place with some Agent Orange and napalm. ‘You shouldhave left the windows open,’ say the experts. So you leave thewindows open, which means your plants survive. But, sadly, yourvideo recorder and PlayStation do not.

Because someone with a Ford Fiesta haircut and baggy trouserswill walk in and help themselves.

Things are no better outside. Keen to have instant results, I laidsome turf the other day and my life became consumed by where thesprinkler was and where it needed to be next. Please God, I wouldwail as the sun girded its loins for another blistering day, havemercy. But there was no mercy, no rain, and now my new turf lookslike that sisal matting in the Fired Earth brochures.

You sit in the garden only when it’s sunny, but you can’t relaxbecause you know the sun is a 5-trillion-ton nuke and by the timeyou go indoors at night every living thing out there, except the

you go indoors at night every living thing out there, except thethistles, will be dead.

I bought some plants with red flowers which stood tall and so erectthat they seemed to have been fertilised with Viagra. After one dayin the sunshine they had keeled over and nothing I have tried willmake them stand up again. I’ve watered them, not watered them,read them poetry, played them Whitney Houston records and shownthem pictures of the Prince of Wales. But it’s hopeless.

I had a tree surgeon round yesterday to talk about the mature treesthat are dotted around the garden. Unbelievably, I have to maintainthese things in case some village kids try to climb them and abranch breaks. That’s true, that is.

His report was shocking. The lime is dying quite fast. The poplarsare pretty much dead already and the sycamore, with a trunk that’sfully 12 feet in circumference, has some kind of incurable rot. So itwill spend the next ten years dropping boughs on passingmotorcyclists who’ll then sue me for negligence.

He has stripped it right back so now it’s virtually naked. But eventhis tree porn has failed to perk the wilting red plants back into life.The oak? That was doing quite well. I think in the past seven yearsit had shot up by a millionth of an inch. But it’s hard to be surebecause the other day a cow ate it. That’s nothing, though. Thehoneysuckle has strangled the cherry. Clematis has suffocated thecopper beech and ivy has asphyxiated one of the silver birches. It’slike The Killing Fields out there.

What about my latest purchase? Six weeks ago I wrote about failingto find a statue of Hitler killing an otter at the Chelsea Flower Show.Now I’ve bought a lump of Canadian driftwood which, I’m assured,died 400 years ago.

Knowing my luck, the damn thing will come back to life.

Sunday 6 July 2003

Men, You Have Nothing to FEAR ButAcronymsThursday should have been a great day. I was with the Royal GreenJackets in a small German village called Copehill Down which is tobe found thirteen miles from anywhere in the middle of SalisburyPlain.

I was part of an eight-man team charged with the task of storming awell-defended house, shooting everyone inside and getting outagain in under fifteen minutes.

The rules were simple. I was to stick with my buddy unless he gotwounded in which case I was to leave him behind. Marvellous. Noneof that soppy American marine nonsense in the British forces.

So, dolled up like Action Man, I had the latest SA80 assault rifleslung over my right shoulder and, in my trouser pockets, a clutchofgrenades.I was goingto kick ass, unleash a hail of hot lead and dothat American war-film thing where I point at my eyes, then point at awood and then make a black power sign, for no reason.

Unfortunately, things went badly. They had asked me to bring alongthe explosives which would blow a hole in the side of the house, butI forgot, which meant we all had to climb through a window. It turnsout that it’s amazingly easy to shoot someone when they’re doingthis.

I was shot the first time in the sitting room and again on the stairs.Then some burly commandos picked me up and shoved me througha trap door into the attic.

Well, when I say ‘through’, this is not entirely accurate. Myembarrassingly significant stomach became wedged in the hole,

embarrassingly significant stomach became wedged in the hole,which meant my head and upper torso were in the loft with three ofthe enemy while the rest of me and my gun were on the landingbelow. And believe me, it’s even easier to shoot someone whenthey’re in this position than when they’re climbing through a window.

Happily, because everyone was firing blanks, I wasn’t really killed.Although my buddy probably wished I had been a few moments laterwhen I threw a grenade at him, blowing most of his legs off.

The problems with doing this sort of thing are many. First, we wereall wearing exactly the same clothes and full warpaint so my buddylooked like everyone else.

And second, there are so many levers on an SA80 that every time Iwanted fully automatic fire, or to engage the laser sights, themagazine fell out.

But worse than this is the army’s insistence on talking almostexclusively in acronyms. Throughout the firefight the house hadechoed to the sound of mumbo-jumbo, none of which made anysense at all. ‘DETCON WOMBAT’ shouted someone into myearpiece. ‘FOOTLING REVERB’ yelled someone else. Rat-a-tat-tatbarked the enemy’s AK47 and beep went my earpiece to signify Ihad been shot again.

Things were not explained in the debrief. This, said the coloursergeant, had been FIBUA (Fighting in Built-Up Areas) and we haddone FISH (Fighting in Someone’s House). Clarkson, he didn’t needto point out, had been a FLOS (Fat Lump of S***).

Needless to say, this was all being filmed for television and mydirector was thrilled. ‘It was great,’ she said. ‘Good stuff for OOV. Allwe need now is a PTC or two, a BCU, then an MCU and we’re done.’

Done we were, so I asked the colonel for directions out of Germanyand back into Wiltshire. ‘Sure,’ he said, starting out well. ‘You goright at Parsonage Farm, right at the church…’ and then he blew it:‘and you’ll be at the Vetcom Spectre Viperfoobarcomsatdefcon.’

‘You mean the exit,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied, and in doing so exposed the lie that acronymswere invented to save time. They weren’t. They were invented tomake you feel part of a club and to exclude, in a sneery mockingsort of way, those who aren’t.

How many times have we seen the president in American filmsordering a man in green clothes to go to Defcon 3? Hundreds. Anddo you know what – I still have no idea what this means, or whichway the numbering goes. Even now, if someone told me to go toDefcon 1, I wouldn’t know whether to launch the nukes or cancellunch.

The trouble is that everyone’s at it. After my day of FISH I drove toLondon and hosted an awards ceremony for the world’s topbankers. The organisers had written a speech which I delivered tothe best of my ability even though I had no idea what any of itmeant. It was full of FIRCS and CUSTODIES and NECRS, and tomake things even more complicated I’d say UBS had had a goodyear on the FIRM and everyone would fall about laughing. I feltexcluded, an outsider. Which is the point of course.

When someone uses an acronym they want you to ask what theymean so they can park an incredulous look on their face: ‘What,you don’t know?’ Then they will look clever when they have toexplain.

A word of warning, though. Don’t try this on television or you will

hear the presenter ask the cameraman to fit the strawberry filter.This is a device reserved for crashing bores who’ve driven a longway to appear on the box and who don’t want to be told that they’renot interesting enough. It means: ‘Set the camera up. But don’tbother turning it on.’

Sunday 13 July 2003

Red Sky at Night, Michael Fish’s Satellite isOn FireI rang the Meteorological Office last week and asked somethingwhich in the whole 149 years of the service it has never been askedbefore. ‘How come,’ I began, ‘your weather forecasts are soaccurate these days?’

Sure, there have been complaints from the tourist industry in recentmonths that the weathermen ‘sex up’ bulletins, skipping over thesunny skies anticipated in England, Scotland and Wales andconcentrating instead on some weather of mass destruction thatthey are juicily expecting to find on Rockall.

That’s as maybe, but the fact is this: weather reports in the pastwere rubbish, works of fiction that may as well have been written byAlistair MacLean. And now they aren’t.

We were told that the heatwave would end last Tuesday, and it did.We were told that Wednesday would be muggy and thundery ashell, and it was. When I woke up on Thursday, without opening thecurtains I knew to put on a thick shirt because they had been sayingfor days that it would be wet, cold and windy.

It is not just 24-hour predictions, either. Now you are told withalarming accuracy what the weather will be like in two or even threedays’ time. So how are the bods in the Met Office’s new Exeterheadquarters doing this?

The man who answered the telephone seemed a bit surprised bythe pleasantness of my question. But once he had climbed backinto his chair and removed the tone of incredulity from his voice, hebegan a long and complicated explanation about modern weatherforecasting.

forecasting.

At least I think it was about weather forecasting. It was so difficult tofollow that, if I am honest, it could have been his mother’s recipe forbaked Alaska.

In a nutshell, it seems that they get hourly reports frommeteorological observation points all over the world. These are thenadded to the findings from a low-orbit satellite that cruises round theworld every 107 minutes, at a height of 800 miles, measuring waveheights.

Other satellites looking at conditions in the troposphere and thestratosphere chip in with their data and then you add sugar, lemonand milk and feed the whole caboodle into a Cray supercomputerthat is capable of making about eleventy billion calculations asecond.

This system, soon to be updated with an even cleverer computer,has been operational since the middle of the 1990s, which doesbeg a big question: what was the point of weather forecastingbefore it came along? Everyone was jolly cross with Michael Fishwhen he didn’t see the 1987 storm coming. But it turns out that hehad no satellites and no computers, just a big checked jacket.

Big checked jackets are no good at predicting the weather. Nor, itseems, are those mud ’n’ cider bods who tramp around Somersetwith big earlobes and a forked twig. Back in the spring a gnarled oldCotswold type told me that because of the shape of the flies and thecurl of the cow pats we were in for a lousy July. My gleaming rednose testifies to the fact that he was wrong.

Then you have people who say you can tell when rain is comingbecause the cows are lying down. Not so. According to my newfriend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

friend at the Met Office, cows lie down because they are tired.

There are some pointers. Swallows fly differently when there isthunder about, and high clouds have tails pointing to the north-westwhen you are about to get wet.

Furthermore, red sky at night signifies that hot, dusty air is comingwhile red sky in the morning shows it has gone away.

However, using the natural world as a pointer is mainly uselessbecause it is good for showing only what weather there is now,which you know, or what is coming in a minute. Pine cones, crowsand especially otters do not know what pressure systems areprevalent in the Atlantic, or where they are going.

Then I said to the man from the Met, what if a low-pressure areasuddenly veers north for no reason? The computer mustoccasionally get it wrong. It does, apparently, but there are sixsenior weather forecasters at the Met Office who decide whether tobelieve it or not.

Now that has to be one of the ballsiest jobs in Britain today. Themost powerful computer is telling you that two and two is five. Andyou have to say, ‘No, it isn’t.’

There is, however, a worrying downside to the accuracy levels ofthis man and machine combo.

The British are known throughout the world for moaning about theweather. It is one of our defining national characteristics. It is not thevariety we hate, though. That is a good thing. It’s theunpredictability. When you turn up at royal Ascot in a pair ofwellingtons and the sun shines all day, it is annoying. And it is thesame story if your summer dress gets all soaked and see-throughat Henley.

What happens if the unpredictability is removed from the equation?If you know what the weather will be like on Tuesday you’ll be ableto organise a barbecue knowing that the sun will be out. Then whatwill you talk about?

Inadvertently, those computer geeks are unpicking the very fabric ofeverything that makes us British.

Sunday 20 July 2003

I Wish I’d Chosen Marijuana and BiscuitsOver Real LifeRight. You’ve got to take me seriously this morning because I am nolongera jumped-up motoring journalist with a head full of rubbish. Iam now a doctor. I have a certificate.

Yes, Brunel University has given me an honorary degree, or anhonoris causa, as we scholars like to call it. So now I am a doctor. Ican mend your leg and give you a new nose. I am qualified to seeyour wife naked and design your next fridge freezer.I think I mighteven have some letters after my name.

Sadly, they don’t send doctorates through the post. So last MondayI had to go to the historic Wembley Conference Centre near theNorth Circular where they gave me a robe and floppy hat that mademe look like a homosexual.

The whole event was designed to run like clockwork. I had been toldweeks beforehand about every last detail, including how many stepsthere were between the entrance and the stage.

I knew why of course. I’d be entering as a normal man, a thicky, andI had to be told there were 21 steps or I might stop halfway, thinkingI’d made it.

On the way out, as a fully fledged doctorof everything, there wereno instructions at all. It just said ‘procession out’.

In between, a man in a robe read out half a million names, most ofwhich seem to have been a collection of letters plucked from aScrabble bag, and the students filed past the chancellor, an endlesssuccession of beaming brown and yellow faces, collected theirdegrees and set off into the world.

degrees and set off into the world.

I was deeply, properly, neck-reddeningly jealous. Dammit, I thought,sitting there in my Joseph coat and my Elton hat. Why didn’t I dothis?

You should never regret any experience, but my God, it is possibleto regret missing out on one. And that’s what I did, 25 years agowhen I decided there were better things to do at school than readMilton.

I used his books as bog rolls and as a result lost my shot atparadise: university.

Yes, things have worked out pretty well since – they even gave mean honorary degree for dangling around under Brunel’s suspensionbridge. Yet there is a chink in the smoothness of it all. Well, more ofa chip really, on my shoulder.

I am sure a university education wouldn’t have made the slightestdifference to my professional life. From what I can gather, studentsspend their three years after school either on an island off Australiapretending to study giant clams, or being pushed down the highstreet in a bed. Or drunk.

Certainly I learnt more in my three years on the RotherhamAdvertiser than some of those students who were at Wembley onMonday.

One, I noted, had studied the ramifications of having sex in prisonwhile another had spent her time looking at the correlation betweenlife in Bhutan and life in Southall.

But I’m no fool. Not now anyway. And I know that even the silliestuniversity course is more fun than putting on a tie every morningand working for a living.

and working for a living.

When I was nineteen, I was trawling the suburbs of Rotherham forstories, listening to fat women telling me their kiddies’ heads werefull of insect eggs and that the council should be doing somethingabout it.

Oh sure, I was paid £17 a week, which covered my petrol and ties.But I was acutely aware that half of my earnings was being takenaway and given to students who were spending it on marijuana andbiscuits. While you were settling down for an evening’s arguing atthe debating society, I was poring overmy SouthYorkshire/ Englishtranslation book, desperately trying to work out what CouncillorDucker was on about.

While you were being bollocked for missing your eighteenth lecturein a row, I was being hauled over the coals for misreading myshorthand notes and as a result getting my report of the inquestdisastrously wrong. And all you had to do to set things right wassleep with your tutor. I could not solve my problem by sleeping withthe libel judge.

When you’ve been educated by the university of life you arrive atthe top completely worn out.

Real university, on the other hand, gives you a leg up so everythingis less exhausting.

Then there is the question of friends. I know people who went touniversity with Stephen Fry and Richard Curtis and Boris Johnson.Let’s not forget that Eric Idle, John Cleese and Graham Chapmanwere at Cambridge together, and what must a night out with that lothave been like? More fun, I should imagine, than a night out withthe friends you made while stocking shelves at Safeway.

Let me try to intellectualise it for you. At the beginning of theceremony in Wembley the Vice-Chancellor of Brunel addressed theaudience saying that there are 50 institutions in Europe that goback more than a thousand years.

There’s the Catholic Church, the parliaments of Britain, Iceland andthe Isle of Man and a few quasi-governmental organisations in Italy.

All the rest are universities. They work. And I missed out. And to mydying day I shall regret it.

Sunday 27 July 2003

I’ve been to Paradise… It was an AbsolutePain‘No.’ That’s what I said when the producers of a programme aboutthe jet engine asked if I’d like to fly round the world in five days.

‘Yes.’ That’s what I said when they pointed out that we’d be breakingthe journey with a day on the beach in somewhere called Moorea,which is a small tropical island five minutes from Tahiti.

On paper, French Polynesia sounds like one of the most exoticidylls anywhere on earth, a collection of 120 or so islands dottedover an area of the south Pacific that’s the same size as Europe. Inreality, it takes 24 hours to get there and it’s not worth the bother.

At the airport everyone from the customs man to the bus drivergave me a necklace of flowers, so that by the time I arrived at thehotel and conference centre I looked like a human garden centreand had a spine the shape of an oxbow lake.

Here, after they’d given me another necklace or two, they wanted toknow about breakfast: not what I wanted, but whether I’d like itdelivered to my room in a canoe.

And therein lies the heart of the problem with all these pointy lumpsof volcanic residue that were pretty much a secret until the jetengine came along. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking aboutMauritius or the Maldives, Tahiti or the Seychelles. They are all thesame: completely overdone.

All of them are advertised in the brochures with a picture of what Iswear is the same palm tree. You must have seen it: the horizontalone, wafting its fronds gently over the turquoise waters and whitesand of pretty well everywhere.

sand of pretty well everywhere.

Then there are the hotels, with their increasingly idiotic ways ofgiving you a taste of life on a tropical island.

This means sharing your bath with half a hundredweight of petalsand finding your bog roll folded into the shape of a rose everymorning and having a monogrammed Hobie Cat moored to yourown manservant. Is that what it was like for Robinson Crusoe? Howdo you know? Because when you’re there, one thing’s for sure, youwon’t set foot outside the hotel grounds.

To complete the picture, the staff are dolled up in a ludicrousfacsimile of what once, perhaps, might have been the nationaldress. Even the blokes in Tahiti had to wear skirts, and to completetheir humiliation they had to walk up and down the superheatedsand all day in bare feet.

Unless of course they were trying to deliver a mountain of baconand eggs, in a canoe, on a choppy sea, without letting it blow awayor go cold or fall into the water.

Small wonder they behaved like everything was too much trouble.Give the poor bastards some shoes, for crying out loud. And somestrides.

Did I mention the dolphin? As a unique selling point the boys inTahiti had caught themselves a big grey beasty which spent all dayon its back, in a lagoon, being pawed by overweight Americanwomen with preposterous plastic tits and unwise G-string bikinibottoms. ‘Would you like to see his penis?’ asked the man in a skirtwhen I climbed into the water.

No. What I’d like to do is spear you through the heart with aharpoon and let the miserable thing have a taste of freedom. Butinstead I tickled its belly and whispered into its ear: ‘Call that a

instead I tickled its belly and whispered into its ear: ‘Call that apenis, acorn crotch.’

Thinking that this sort of thing is giving you a taste of life on atropical island is as silly as thinking you can get a taste of beef fromlicking a cow. On a real tropical island, like Tom Hanks in Castaway,you have to smash your own teeth out with ice skates and talk tofootballs, and there are insects, huge articulated things with thehead and upper torso of a hornet and the rear end of a wolf.

I stayed at one hotel, can’t remember where, where they made thelocals trample about in the flower beds all day with VolkswagenBeetle engines on their backs spraying the bushes with insecticide.

Occasionally one of the poor chaps would gas himself to death, orcatch his skirt in the machinery, and have to be carted off. But soonthere’d be another in his place. And for what purpose? To sanitiseparadise? It didn’t work. So far as I could see, the spray seemed tomake the insects a little bit bigger.

Don’t be fooled by the sun either. It may look nice in the pictures,dipping its feet into the sea after a hard day warming the solarsystem, but in reality it’ll cause you to sit in the shade all day untilyou look like a stick of forced rhubarb. And it’ll melt the glue in thespine of your book, allowing the last ten pages to blow away justbefore you get there.

There’s no respite at night either. You won’t be able to sleep withthe air con on, it’ll be too noisy. And you won’t be able to sleep withit off because then all you’ll hear is the squeals of the honeymooncouple in the authentic bungalow next door.

Only once have I been to a tropical beach that was completelyunmolested. It was in Vietnam and it was perfect. Except that after

twenty minutes or so I wanted a girl in a skimpy ao dai to bring me acold Coke.

And there’s the thing. We dream the tropical dream. But we’re builtto live in Dewsbury.


Eureka, I’ve Discovered a Cure forScienceA report in the paper last week said that the world is running out ofscientists as pupils opt for ‘easy’ subjects like media studies ratherthan difficult ones like the effect of fluorocarbons onmethionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylanylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylleucylglycylaspartylprolylglycylisoleucylutamylglutaminylserylleucyllysylisoleucylaspartylthreonylleucyl…

Sadly, I shall have to call a halt to the actual name of this natty littleprotein at this point because I’m paid by the word. And I don’t wantto get to the end of the column having written only one. It illustratesthe point neatly, though. Which would you rather do? Hang aroundin Soho, drinking skinny lattes with Graham Norton, or emigrate tosomewhere like Durham and spend your life teaching hydrogen howto speak?

That’s not such a silly idea because underneath the report about ashortage of scientists was another which said that a professor ofacoustics at Salford University has proved that, contrary to popularbelief, a duck’s quack does echo.

Though only faintly.

Who gives a stuff? Apparently, the professor in question was tryingto solve the problem of echoey public address systems in churchesand stadiums. But quite what the duck has to do with this, I have noidea. I mean, what’s he going to do? Give the vicar’s job to amallard?

Elsewhere in the world, other scientists have been monitoring 25sites in America’s Great Basin. And they’ve found that the pika, asmall and useless relative of the rabbit, is not coping as well asmight be hoped with global warming. Oh dear.

Here at home, scientists have discovered that children who gorgeon fizzy drinks in the morning have the reaction times of a 70-year-old. Only, I should imagine, if the fizzy drink in question ischampagne.

Ooh, here’s a good one. Two British teams of medical researchershave generated a human cell. Sounds spooky, so should we beworried? Not really. They say this is the first step to growingreplacement livers, but this seems a trifle farfetched since there isno way of telling a cell what to become. You may hope for a liverand end up with an ear. Only God can decide, and thanks toscience all his representatives on earth are soon to be replacedwith ducks.

I know it must be depressing when Greenpeace rolls around onyour important and juicy discoveries, like GM food, but why haveyou spent so long determining that women who take pain-killers atthe time of conception are more likely to miscarry? Even you, inyour freezing lab, must realise that conception cannot happenunless something takes the headache away first.

It gets worse. In America, scientists have spent $1.2 m (£750,000)of public money trying to prove that conservatives are nutty. InCanada, they’ve studied 2,000 Pisceans and determined they’re notall wetties who are still crying over Born Free. And in Holland,they’re examining a prehistoric slug that has no brain or sex organsto see if it’s some kind of evolutionary missing link. Unlikely, if itdoesn’t have a penis or a womb.

For heaven’s sake people, where’s the next Concorde? Where’s thepill we can live on instead of food, and what about the dog in aspace suit we were promised by Valerie Singleton? Put your ducksaway and do something useful.

With this in mind, I went to see Professor Kevin Warwick in thecybernetics department of Reading University last week. He hasbuilt what looks like a radio-controlled car but in fact it’s a robot thathas the intelligence, he says, of a wasp.

If you turn its power supply off, it will look for more, in the same waythat a wasp will look for food. And it can be programmed to buzzaround your head all day too.

Warwick is so obsessed with artificial intelligence he recently had aplug surgically implanted in his nervous system. Then he hookedhimself up to a computer so, as he moved his handin NewYork, arobotic hand back home in Reading moved too.

And his point is? Well, I had no idea until he told me that he’d hadhis wife’s central nervous system hooked up to the web too. Nowthat… that boggles the mind. The possibilities of feeling what yourwife feels, and vice versa, have to be one of the most excitingbreakthroughs since… since… ever. And imagine being tapped intothe brain of a computer at the same time. Working on the G-spotand a system to beat the gee-gees simultaneously.

My enthusiasm was curbed somewhat when Warwick explained thata man/machine hybrid might not be satisfied with the governorshipof California and could, perhaps, decide one day to wreak a trail ofdestruction across the world. I suggested that machines are neverscary because you can always turn them off but he smiled the smileof a brainbox and said, simply: ‘Really? How do you turn the internetoff then?’

If he has a point then maybe a dearth of scientists over the comingyears is no bad thing. Because it would only take one to put downhis duck for five minutes and destroy the planet.


Why the Booker Shortlist Always Losesthe PlotA couple of months ago I wrote about books here. It was the time ofthe Hay Festival, which is like Glastonbury only quieter, more dustyand without Rolf Harris.

Jilly Cooper had hit out at the intellectual snobbery of it all. ‘Thereare two categories of writers,’ she said at the time, ‘Jeffrey Archerand me, who long and long for a kind word in the Guardian, and theothers who get all the kind words and long to be able to do whatJeffrey and I do.’

Wise words. But not wise enough, it seems, for the panel of judgeswho selected this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist.

Joint favourite to win is a book called Brick Lane by Monica Ali,which is centred on the letters exchanged between two sisters, oneof whom lives in Bangladesh and one who came to London for anarranged marriage.

Now I haven’t read it, and I never will, but I think we can be fairlysure that neither of the sisters will have a torrid affair with anunsuitable rogue called Rupert.

So what of the other joint favourite? That’s from Margaret Atwood,who has got her, I suspect, voluminous knickersina tangle overMonsanto and its GM food development. Oryx and Crake, her book,is unlikely to be a comedy.

It’s also worth mentioning Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, whichis about a young medic who finds himself posted to a tribalhomeland in South Africa. Is he dive-bombed by F-15 fighters? Isthe Nimitz sunk? Don’t hold your breath.

the Nimitz sunk? Don’t hold your breath.

I have just finished a book by Philip Roth, one of the most reveredhighbrow authors, and it was astonishing. It’s about the owner of aglove factory in New Jersey whose daughter came off the rails a bit.

I ploughed on through page after page of undeniably beautifulprose dying to know if he’d get his daughter back. But all I got wasmore and more agonising until it just stopped.

It’s almost as though Roth rang the publishers and asked: ‘How longwould you like my next novel to be?’ And when they said 250 pages,he said, ‘Oh good, I’ve finished.’

Before this, I read Gulag by Anne Applebaum, which was mainly aletter to other people who’ve written about the Soviet camps, sayingthey were all wrong. Wrong, do you hear.

But worst of all was Stupid White Men by the Stupid White Manhimself, Michael Moore.

After the first chapter – an interesting account of how George Bushstole the presidency – it degenerated into an adolescent rant from astudent bedsit, circa 1982. Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher. Bigcompanies. Thatcher. Rainforests.

Governments would rather spend their money on another bomberthan education, and why do we fear black men when every bit ofsuffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?

He droned on and on and I couldn’t take anything he said seriouslybecause in the introduction, before the eco-friendly, power-to-the-people garbage really started to splash onto the page, he criticisedthe British for privatising ‘formerly well-run public entities’ – like therail network.

What? British Rail? Well run? You stupid, fat, four-eyed, grinning,bearded imbecile. He even admitted that he dropped out of collegebecause he couldn’t find anywhere to park. You should have goneon the train, if you love them so much.

I could heap scorn on Moore until hell freezes over – but back to mypoint. A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, aleft-wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anythingelse, a story. With a story, you have the most powerful of emotions:hope.

You ‘hope’ Clint Thrust manages to abseil from his Apache gunshipsuccessfully and that the third world war is averted. You ‘hope’ thatthe heroine meets the hero on the bridge at midnight and they alllive happily ever after. You ‘hope’ that the dream to live in Provenceworks out.

Sure, I got plenty of hope from Philip Roth. I spent the entire timehoping the glove maker would get his daughter back, but it wasdashed by the sudden appearance of the ISBN number.

In Stupid White Men I hoped the author would fall out of a tallbuilding, but that never happened either.

My wife reads books the size of Agas about women in beekeeperhats who spend 50 years in Peru looking for a lost bracelet. ManBooker books, in other words.

Sometimes I snatch them away and ask: ‘What do you hopehappens next?’ and I always get the same answer: ‘Nothing really.’

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book thatbecomes more important in my life than life itself.

When I was in the middle of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy –which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist – you couldhave taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t havenoticed.

Which brings me to Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis. It’s awful,apparently. Reading it, said Tibor Fischer, the novelist, whoreviewed it in the Daily Telegraph, was like your favourite unclebeing caught masturbating in the school playground.

His views were shared by the Man Booker judges who have left itout of ‘the final six’. I bet it’s fabulous.


Look in the Souvenir Shop and Weep forEnglandPicture the scene. We were in France having lunch at Club 55 onthe beach in St Tropez and I was explaining to my children just howgood the French are at cheese and wine.

And then it happened. Having tried the Brie and declared it to bedelicious, my nine-year-old daughter looked up and, out ofnowhere, asked the most impossible question I’ve ever faced.‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘what are the English good at?’

Now I’ve been ready for some time for her to say: ‘I know I came outof Mummy’s tummy but how did I get in there in the first place?’ I’vebeen preparing for that one. But: ‘What are the English good at?’ Ittook me so completely by surprise that I suddenly felt the need toshove a fish’s head into her mouth.

‘Well,’ I stammered. ‘We, er… we’re good at…’ For someextraordinary reason Harold Shipman’s name came into my head.‘Murdering people,’ I suggested. Well we are. We’ve even startedexporting our murderers. But I think that in a world murderingleague, sinister Belgium is still at No. 1.

I had a quick canter round all the usual suspects: football, cricket,tennis, motor racing and so on, and could come up with nothing. SoI moved into the world of innovation and again drew a blank. Our bigpolythene balloon tore. Our Eurofighter doesn’t work if it’s chilly. Ourtrains are not quite as fast as they were before the Second WorldWar when they were named after ducks such as the mallard.

I’m having a crisis about being English at the moment. I was in Berlinlast week, the day after Mr Blair had been to see Schroder andChirac about Iraq, and it was strange walking around the Fatherland

Chirac about Iraq, and it was strange walking around the Fatherlandapologising to everyone for my country’s conduct in the war.

Speaking of which, did you know that HMS Invincible has to limparound the world on one engine because the Royal Navy cannotafford the fuel for two? How frightening is that?

But this is symptomatic of a serious problem. Beneath the surface,everything is half cocked. Have you, for instance, inadvertentlywalked through a staff-only door into some back staircase in anypublic building? It’s unbelievable. Miles of institutional paintdragging plaster off the walls. Huge puddles on the floor, some ofwhich smell of rain and some of which don’t. Unshaded light bulbssmeared with melted moths from the 1940s. Broken hinges. Noticeboards bearing news of retirement parties. Tick if you want to go. Noone has.

On Thursday night I watched a fabulous programme about thebuilding of London’s sewers. They were constructed in 1856 andhave been almost unmaintained ever since. There are, apparently,186,000 miles of sewers in Britain and in 2002 only 241 miles weremended or replaced.

British Airways is run by an Australian and the English football teamis managed by a Swede. Vodafone, Lloyds TSB and the British bidto run the Olympics are now all being run by Yanks. And accordingto my friends in the City that’s now almost exclusively American too.

To get an idea of the scale of the problem, next time you’re passingthrough Terminal 1 at Heathrow check out the souvenir shop, thelast chance visitors have to take home a taste of England.

Every airport has one of these. In Detroit, Ford, GM and Motown allrun gift shops where you can buy toy cars and posters of MarthaReeves. In Iceland you can buy a nice jumper or a book about

Reeves. In Iceland you can buy a nice jumper or a book aboutwaterfalls. In Barbados they do a selection of hot sauces. In Canadathey’ll sell you a cute dead seal. ‘Squeeze its tummy and real bloodspurts out of the wound on its head.’

In New York I bought a limited-edition plastic statue of a firemancarrying a buddy through what looks like some chips and ketchupbut is in fact bits of the Trade Center. It’s called Red Hats ofCourage.

But at Heathrow all you can get is a flavour of what Britain used tobe. The reality is that today’s bobby wears a flak jacket and doesn’tventure onto the beat without a belt full of mustard gas. But at theairport shop you’re offered a teddy bear dressed like Dixon of DockGreen.

Can you imagine the gift shop at Charles de Gaulle offering visitorsdolls in berets with onions round their necks? Or the Australiansselling bears in convict suits with chains round their feet?

Here, you half expect to find Winston Churchill dressed up as abeefeater and a talking Sir Walter Raleigh doll in a London taxi.‘Awight guv. ’Ave a fag. Cor lummy.’

Then there’s the Queen. How many other countries try to selltourists crockery featuring a picture of their head of state? ABerlusconi bowl? A Putin plate? I don’t think so.

Here, though, they were obviously so desperate to fill the shelveswith something – anything – that they will even sell you a plasticUnion Jack. How desperate is that? Even Luxembourg doesn’t haveto resort to selling you a flag.

But of course if the gift shop wanted to represent England todayaccurately, it’d be tough. Everyone would be going home with aHarold Shipman mug.

Harold Shipman mug.


Eton – It’s Worse than an Inner-CityComprehensiveOliver Letwin announced last week that he would rather beg on thestreets than send his children to an inner-city state school. He is anold Etonian.

Predictably, every whining, thin-lipped, pasty-faced, shapelesssocialist from one end of Haringey to the other is on the radiomoaning and groaning and generally having angst. ‘Oh, it’s not fair,’they wail. Damn right. It’s not fair either that you’ve got a face like aslapped spaniel. But that’s life, loser. Get used to it.

Actually, I don’t think old Etonian Oliver went far enough. There isno end to the things I would do to keep my children out of an inner-city state school. I’d rent my car to a minicab firm, my bottom to aninternet downloader and my spare room to a family of Azerbaijanis.

Nothing, nothing annoys me more than people who sacrifice theirchildren on the altar of political ideals. The notion that you wouldsend your kids to a drug-addled, bullet-ridden comp to be taught bya lout in a bomber jacket because you ‘like, you know, don’t believein private education’ makes my liver fizz.

I’m not alone either. Every day the M40 is chock-full of families, theirmeagre possessions strapped to the roofs of their cars, fleeing fromthe horror of state education in London. I even have one of themstaying in my house right now.

She’s not looking for a house here in the Cotswolds. That’ll come intime. What she’s looking for first is a school where her son canlearn to add and subtract in the old-fashioned way with cakes andsweets. Rather than: ‘If you stab Johnnie and he loses three pints ofblood, how many pints will he have left?’

blood, how many pints will he have left?’

The problem is that the debate on education cannot be takenseriously when it is opened by an OE like Letwin. Did you see him atthe conference last week? Iain Duncan Smith was on the stage,fumbling for his autocue, some berk in a suit three sizes too big wastrying to get the osteoporotic audience to its gouty feet every fifteenseconds and there, in the front row, was Eton-educated Letwin, whoappeared to be sitting on an electrical socket of some kind.

His face had gone a funny shade of purple and his whole head wasrocking about so wildly that at one point I really thought it was indanger of coming off.

Letwin is a funny sort of cove. I sat next to him at dinner once andfound him charming, amusing and about 9 inches tall. Also, he is soclever that you get the impression that he’s teetering all the time onthe edge of slipping into Latin.

Certainly we know by his appearance on News night before the lastgeneral election that he has a fondness for togas.

None of this matters, though. He could decide to address theNational Allotments Society in Aramaic. He could decide to goeverywhere for a week on one leg. But everything he does isovershadowed by where he went to school. You just know how hisobituary is going to read:

‘Mr Oliver Letwin, who was educated at Eton, exploded today.Onlookers described how his head became so full of knowledge thathis face turned purple and burst.

‘“Stephen Fry told him a little-known fact about Homer and it was thefinal straw. There simply wasn’t enough storage space for any moreinformation in his brain,” an Eton-educated doctor said later.

‘Mr Boris Johnson, another old Etonian, was devastated. “Ego sumgutted,” he said.’

Say someone went to Eton and everyone assumes you’re dealingwith a sneering man with floppy hair whose elder brother is in thearmy.

And while we were at school learning about John Donne, the boysat Eton, of course, learnt how to run over members of the workingclass and how, by speaking very loudly, there is no need for French.

There was also a famous essay written on the subject of poverty byan Eton pupil: ‘The father was poor. The mother was poor. Thechildren were poor. The butler was poor. The cook was poor. Theprojectionist was poor. The chauffeur was poor.’ Real world? It stopsjust outside Windsor and starts again in Slough.

But this caricature isn’t true. You can no longer walk through thedoor simply because your surname is longer than the averagechemical symbol.

You need to be very, very bright. And what’s more, two of mybestest friends went there in the 1970s. And they’ve turned out allright(ish).

But the stigma is still there.

We’re never told that ‘Newsnight is presented by Jeremy Paxman,who went to Malvern.’ And nor does the announcer ever say: ‘Andnow Jonathan Ross, who went to some godforsaken hellhole inLeytonstone.’

My wife has put my son down to go to Eton but this will happen overmy dead body and all the bits I’ve rented out to keep him away from

the state schools in Lambeth. I know that he would have a greateducation for five years but he’d have to spend the next 50 beingan old Etonian.

At a comprehensive school he’d be better off because it would bethe other way round: five years of being knifed followed by 50 greatyears of being able to get a dart out of his eye without blubbing.


A Giant Leap Back for MankindLike most middle-aged people, I don’t know where I was when JohnF. Kennedy was shot. But I do know where I was when the AirFrance Concorde crashed into a Paris hotel. And I know where I’llbe next Friday: on board the world’s only supersonic airliner as itmakes its final scheduled flight from New York to London.

As I step off, the temptation will be strong to say: ‘That was onesmall step for a man. But one giant leap backwards for mankind.’

It’s hard to think of past examples where human beings had thetechnology to progress but held back. Maybe AD410, when theRomans pulled out of Britain, but not since. It’s not in our nature tosnuff out the fire.

We went to the moon and now Beagle 2 is on its way to Mars. Weinvented the steam engine and replaced it almost immediately withinternal combustion. We went to America in three hours… and nowwe can’t any more. It doesn’t make sense.

When the British and French governments decided to commission asupersonic jet liner in 1962, the engineers had no clue how such athing might be achieved. Sure, they had jet fighters up there in thestratosphere, doing more than twice the speed of sound, but thesewere being flown by young men with triangular torsos in G-suits.The politicians were talking about putting overweight businessmenup there, in lounge suits.

Friends at NASA have told me that the technological challenge ofmaking a Mach-2.2 passenger jet was greater than putting a manon the moon. Those rocket boys get all teary-eyed about theirbeloved Apollos. But when you mention the Concorde, their eyesdry and they nod, slowly and reverentially.

dry and they nod, slowly and reverentially.

That’s because life beyond the 750-mph sound barrier is seriouslyhostile. There’s the friction, which generates so much heat thatplanes swell by up to a foot.

There’s a spot on Concorde’s dash that, in flight, is so hot youcould fry an egg on it. Then there’s the shock wave, a phenomenonof such ferocity that it jams the hydraulics and freezes the controls.

Toward the end of the Second World War, pilots who put theirSpitfires into a dive often lost control and could not pull up. Theydidn’t know it at the time but a supersonic shock wave, the source ofthe sonic boom, was to blame. It sat on the trailing edge of thewings, preventing the ailerons from moving. To get a plane to flythrough the sound barrier, this shock wave has to be tamed.

Of course, you can’t let the supersonic savagery anywhere nearthose delicate Olympus engines. The air has to be slowed downbefore it’s allowed into the intakes and past the spidery blades.

To make things even more complicated, there’s the bothersomebusiness of fuel consumption and reliability.

A typical fighter jet of the 1960s, the Lightning, for instance, was outof juice after about 45 minutes. And it needed up to two weeks ofmaintenance after a sortie.

Concorde had to fly in that cruel place, where the air is asdestructive as a nuclear blast, for 4,000 miles. Then it had to turnaround and come home.

The Americans failed with their Supersonic Transport because theyaimed for Mach 3 and the exotic materials needed to withstand theheat at this speed weren’t commercially available back then. TheRussians were more realistic with their Tupolov but it failed because

Russians were more realistic with their Tupolov but it failed becauseit only had a range of 1,500 miles.

It’s worth remembering that Concorde was built by trial and errorafter error. Men wearing Brylcreem and store coats, endlesslylobbing paper darts down the wind tunnel in Filton.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technologicalachievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

And not just technically but politically. France and Britain couldn’teven agree on how it should be spelt. They finally decided that itshould end in an ‘e’, in the French style, but then Macmillan fell outwith de Gaulle and dropped the letter.

It was Tony Benn, the then secretary of state for industry, whosolved the matter by declaring it would be ‘e’ for England, ‘e’ forEurope and ‘e’ for entente cordiale.

Benn saved Concorde over and over again. He even had to fightthe Americans who, in a fit of sour grapes, tried to ban the plane onthe grounds that its sonic boom would knock over their cows.

They kicked up such a stink that, bit by bit, the world began to loseconfidence in the plane. One by one, the sixteen airlines that hadordered Concorde began to cancel until just two were left: AirFrance and BOAC.

Knowing that the plane was destined to be a commercial disaster,Benn had to cajole the Treasury and the French until, on 21January 1976, the scheduled services began. For the first time,paying passengers could fly so fast they could watch the sun rise inthe west and arrive in America before they left home.

The cost to the British taxpayer was astronomical: £1.34 billion.Even in today’s money, that would nearly get you two Domes.

Even in today’s money, that would nearly get you two Domes.

But, astonishingly, the white elephant became a cash cow. Eventhough this exotic plane arrived as Freddie Laker began to take theworking classes to New York for £59, it regularly flew three-quartersfull and made £20 million a year for BA.

From my point of view, in a Fulham flat, Concorde was simply adevice that prevented me hearing the second item on the six andten o’clock news. Twice a night the hum of central London would bedrowned by the crackle from those massive engines. And twice anight the entire city would look up. Familiarity never bredindifference.

And then. As I stepped off a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter in Yorkmy phone rang to say Concorde had crashed into a Paris hotel.

My reaction was the same as yours. Initial shock that was onlyslightly lessened when we found out it was an Air France bird andthe people on board were not British. Usually, in an accident of thiskind, we mourn the people who have died.

But this time it was different. For the first time since Titanic wemourned the loss of the machine itself.

The great white dart. The machine that reminded Londoners twice aday how great we once had been. The plane that was 40 years oldbut still at the cutting edge of everything. It was not invincible afterall.

It never had been, actually. On one BA flight from New York toLondon one of the engine intakes refused to budge, increasing thedrag and therefore the fuel consumption. The captain ignored theadvice of his engineer and number two that they should land atShannon in Ireland to refuel and cruised over the middle of London,arriving at Heathrow with enough juice for 90 seconds more flight. It

arriving at Heathrow with enough juice for 90 seconds more flight. Itran dry while taxiing to the stand. Joan Collins never knew howclose she came to being a permanent fixture in the wreckage ofwhat had once been Harrods.

After the Paris crash and 11 September, public confidence inConcorde dried up. I flew on it for the first time last year andcouldn’t believe how empty it was.

There were lots of things I couldn’t believe, actually. Like how smallthe windows were, and where in such a tiny fuselage they foundspace for such an extraordinarily well-stocked wine cellar. And hownoisy it was in the back. But most of all I couldn’t believe the surgeof acceleration as it cleared Cornwall and the afterburners took usup past 1,000 mph.

Unless my children become fighter pilots, they’ll never feel thatsurge.

No company or government in the world is currently undertakingserious work on a supersonic airliner. There’s talk of Gulfstreambuilding a Mach 2 business jet and there are whisperings about a‘scramjet’ plane that could get from London to Sydney in two hours.

In the early 1990s, British Aerospace and Aerospatiale held secrettalks about developing a 225-seat aircraft that could get across thePacific at Mach 2.5. But when the proposed cost of such a thingworked out at £9 billion, they decided to build a double-decker businstead.

Do you think Columbus would have reached America if he’dconcerned himself with the bottom line? Do you think Armstrongwould have walked on the moon or Hillary on the top of Everest?Was it profit that took Amundsen to the South Pole or drove Turing

to invent the computer?

Compounding the problem is a sense that the First World haspulled so far ahead of the Third, the money would be better spenthelping others to catch up. For every pound spent on humanadvancement, there are a thousand bleeding hearts saying themoney could have been spent on the starving in Africa. I see theirpoint.

But what I cannot see is the human thirst for improvement beingextinguished by the bean counters. No individual company orcountry could afford to develop a plane that’s significantly betterthan Concorde, so maybe what’s needed is a ring-fenced globalfund for the greater good. A fund that undertakes the work businesswon’t touch, hunting the skies for asteroids, searching the seas tofind a cure for cancer and fuelling our quest to go faster and faster.

Or maybe the days of mechanical speed are over. Why go toAmerica at the speed of sound when, with an internet connectionand video conferencing, you can be there at the speed of light?Why go at all?

Maybe planes are about to follow in the footsteps of the horse.When the car came along, the horse didn’t go away. It simplystopped being a tool and became a toy.

A show jumper. A playmate for twelve-year-old girls.

If you can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere the onlyreason to travel is for fun, for your holidays. And given the choice ofdoing that at Mach 2 or for £2, I know which I’d choose.

Perhaps, then, this is not a step backwards. Maybe Concorde diesnot because it’s too fast but because, in the electronic age, it’sactually too slow.

What a Wonderful Flight into NationalFailureNot much will get me out of bed at 4.30 a.m. in the morning.Especially when I’ve only climbed into it at 3.30 a.m. But whenyou’ve got one of the hundred tickets for the last flight ofConcorde… I even had a shave.

They seated me right in front of the lavatory, or Piers Morgan, editorof the Daily Mirror, as you know him, and between a future hedgeinvestment broker and an American who’d paid $60,000 to be therein some kind of eBay charity auction.

One of the girls flying was completely horrified at the guest list.‘There aren’t even any press,’ she said. ‘Well,’ I said, hurting just alittle bit, ‘that tubby bloke’s from the Independent. And then there’sthe Mail, the BBC, ABC, NBC, ITN, PA, CNN, Sky, the Sun, theGuardian and the Telegraph.’

‘But where’s Hello!?’ That’s what she wanted to know.

There’d been talk of Elton John turning up and maybe GeorgeMichael too. But in the end all we had was a woman in a wig whom Irecognised from a film called The Stud, and someone who used tobe married to Billy Joel.

The rest? Well there was the chairman of every company from theFootsie, all of them a little bit northern, a little bit florid and, dare Isay it, a little bit heavy around the middle.

Despite the weight, Concorde heaved itself into a crystal New Yorkmorning at 7.38 a.m. and banking hard – but not so hard that ourPol Roger Winston Churchill champagne fell over – pointed its noseat the rising sun and went home. For the last time.

at the rising sun and went home. For the last time.

I was, it must be said, in the mood for a party but this is hard inwhat’s essentially a Mach-2 veal crate. It is possible to leave yourseat but you will not be able to stand up properly and then you willhave to sit right back down again when the drinks trolley needs toget past.

As we hammered through Mach 1, I asked the hedge-fund manwhat it was like to go through the sound barrier for his first, andeveryone’s last time. But he’d nodded off.

The American was deep in monologue with himself. There are notelevision screens – to save weight – and I’d left my book in my bag.

Concorde was not really designed as a party venue. Unlike the 747with its larders and its video games, it is a child of the 1950s, a timewhen you were expected to make your own entertainment. So I did. Ilobbed my drink over Morgan.

British Airways were keen that this, the final flight, should not beseen as a wake but rather a celebration of 27 remarkable years.

And to be honest, there was a celebratory mood both in thedeparture lounge and on the tarmac, where all the pilots of theother early-morning flights sent goodwill messages.

However, at 3.24 p.m. local time, as we dropped back down to Mach0.98, the mood changed. As everyone realised that we had beenthe last people to fly faster than the speed of sound without aparachute, it was as though a veil of sadness had been drapedover the cabin.

Over London we couldn’t help noticing the landmarks of modernBritain. The Dome.

The Millennium Bridge. The traffic jams. The Mirror offices. Andhere we were in the last reminder of how great and innovative wehad once been. And we thought: what’s going to remind us now?

There was applause as the wheels touched down but in the next 40minutes, as they unhooked the power and the crowds tookphotographs, we may as well have been at a funeral. The drink hadflowed but the veil, by this time, had become a blanket.

Idon’t feel sorry for the chairmen who will now need seven hours toget across the Atlantic. It was, after all, their meanness that causedthis final flight in the first place.

I don’t feel sorry for the nation. It’s our own fault that we don’t makemachines like this any more. I don’t even feel sorry for the peoplewho’d struggled to keep Concorde flying these past few years:they’ll all get other jobs.

I do, however, feel sorry for the machine itself. It’s sitting in its shednow, wondering what it’s done wrong. Why did it not fly yesterdayand why is there no sense that it will fly today? Why is nobodytinkering with its engines and vacuuming its carpets?

And what was that last flight all about? Why were so many peopletaking photographs and why, after 27 years, did every single one ofHeathrow’s 30,000 employees turn out to watch it do what it wasdesigned to do?

I like to believe that a machine does have a heart and a soul. I liketo think of them as ordinary people think of dogs. They cannot reador write or understand our spoken words. But they understand whatwe’d like them to do in other ways. Go left. Go right. Go faster. Sit.Lie.

So go ahead. Think of Concorde as a dog that you’ve had in thefamily for 27 years. Think of the way it has never once let you down.And how thrilled it is when you feed it and pet it and take it out for awalk.

And now try to imagine how that dog would feel if you locked it upone night. And never went back.


The Peace Game in Iraq is Jeux sansFrontieèresYou probably thought, as I did, that Iraq had been conquered by theAmericans and that Tony Blair had been allowed to take and holdthe equivalent of Bournemouth.

In other words, you thought it was a two-country coalition.

But no. Back in February, President George W. Bush announcedthat despite the best endeavours of the cheese-eating surrendermonkeys, he had gathered together 30 like-minded countries andthat this ‘force for good’ would bring peace, goodwill and Texaco toIraq.

Unfortunately, the 30 countries he had assembled did not includeGermany, Russia or China: nations with proud fighting histories andlots of submarines. No. He ended up with an extraordinary collectionincluding Estonia, which did have an army in 1993. But lost it.

No, really; the Estonian army was ordered to capture a Russianmilitary town but the soldiers decided this was an unpleasant way ofearning a living and went off, on their own, to fight organised crimeinstead.

Today Estonia has conscription but most young men get around thissimply by not turning up. I don’t blame them. What’s the point ofspending a year playing soldiers when the most frightening thing inyour country’s military arsenal is the general’s dog?

A few years ago the Germans, the Finns and the Swedes had awhip-round and gave their tiny neighbour some uniforms, a coupleof patrol boats and a Piper aircraft, but as for guns – well, theEstonians have an Uzi they bought from the Israelis.

Estonians have an Uzi they bought from the Israelis.

In a conflict with Iraq, Estonia would have been a pleasant but fairlyuseless ally. As would Azerbaijan, which joined the coalition eventhough it, too, lost its army fourteen months ago and it hasn’t turnedup yet in Iraq.

President Heydar Aliyev had tried to make life bearable for histroops and even set up a charitable foundation so they could bepaid. But as winter drew in last year the soldiers left their barracks,saying they were sick of living without heat and with only an hour ofrunning water a day.

Still, at least Bush could rely on Honduras. Sure, its adult populationis the same size as Sheffield’s and yes, most people live in housesmade from sugar-cane stalks. But there is a modern, well-equippedarmy and I’m sure the special ‘jungle squad’ would have been usefulin Iraq’s desert.

As it turned out, however, the Hondurans never turned up. Nor didthe Japanese, who were planning on sending 1,000 peacekeepers.In the wake of last week’s big bomb, the Japanese decided it wouldbe better if they just stayed at home. India and Turkey followed suit.

South Korea is also unwilling to commit, but I guess it’s hard toworry about events 10,000 miles away when your next-doorneighbour is pointing a thermonuclear weapon through your letterbox.

As a result, the team of nations in Iraq looks as though it has beenpicked by the primary school kid who got to go second. France wonthe toss and nicked all the big, good players leaving Uncle Sam withthe Ukrainians who spend 30 per cent of their GDP on the military(47p), the Romanians who are busy training the new Iraqi policeforce, the Hungarians who have sent 140 logistics experts, the New

force, the Hungarians who have sent 140 logistics experts, the NewZealanders who have sent some bandages, and the Bulgarianswho, presumably, look after the umbrellas.

The Czechs sent 400 policemen but the men have got notes fromtheir mothers and will be going home next month – and it’s likely tobe the same story with the Italians, who are always up for a fight.Until it starts.

I think everyone with their head screwed on the right way roundknew that it would be jolly easy for America’s enormous militarymachine to topple the Ba’ath party in Iraq, even without theHonduran jungle squad and Estonia’s second-hand patrol boat.

But we also knew it would be very hard to sort out the messafterwards. And sure enough, every time the Poles or the Dutchrebuild a water pipe or a power station, half a dozen Talibans drivetheir Toyotas into it.

It took nearly 80 years to pacify Northern Ireland, where there areonly two factions, while in Iraq there are about 120, who can alltrace their vendettas back to the Garden of Eden.

To make matters worse, there’s not much cohesion among theoccupying forces either. One minute a burly Australian comes intoyour house looking for nuclear weapons, the next a Ukrainian popsround to see if you’d like a job in the police force – and then you getshot in the face by a Shi’ite because a Sunni saw you talking to aNorwegian sergeant about that Bulgarian bird in the wirelesssection.

Meanwhile, the 130,000 Americans with their Apache gunships andtheir limitless supply of money are bogged down, trying to work outif Saddam Hussein had anything more dangerous in his chemicalcupboard than aspirin.

cupboard than aspirin.

The war is over, said Bush. Well, you may have stopped playing,matey, but trust me on this: what you have left behind are 187different teams all playing different games on the same pitch.

Sunday 16 November 2003

The Juries are Scarier than the CriminalsOne day, many years ago, when I was a trainee reporter on a localnewspaper in the socialist republic of South Yorkshire, a womantelephoned the newsdesk to say her house ‘were disgusting’.

I went round, and sure enough it was very dirty and full of equallydirty children, some of whom belonged to the caller.

She wasn’t sure which ones exactly, but she was very sure of onething: cockroaches were burrowing into her head, through her ears,and laying eggs behind her eyes.

She wasn’t mad. But she was thick. Thick enough to believe shewas thin enough to wear a miniskirt. And thick enough to believe herhead was full of maggots when, in fact, it was full of nothing at all.

She wasn’t unusual, either. Every day back then I would meetpeople who knew only to eat when hungry and lash out at anyonewho they suspected might be ‘looking at them’. People, in otherwords, with less capacity for logical thought than a dishwasher.

They haven’t gone away. Just the other night I was watching apolice programme. A young man had been apprehended after hewas seen driving erratically and he was, not to put too fine a pointon it, incapable of either coherent thought or coherent speech.

When the policeman asked if the car was his, he looked like he’dbeen asked to explain the atomic properties of lithium. He had theIQ of a daffodil, the conversational ability of a cushion and theintelligence of his mother who, at the time, was standing outside thepolice car shouting ‘Oi, pig!’ over and over again.

And yet because this man wasn’t a vet or a vicar he could beselected for jury service. Yup, this man, and the woman with

selected for jury service. Yup, this man, and the woman withcockroach eggs in her forehead, are deemed bright enough todetermine the outcome of what might well be a multi-million-poundfraud trial.

Now you may not have noticed, but in between the end of the lastparliament and the Queen’s speech, when everyone was focusedon the big issues of foundation hospitals and university funding, thegovernment was struggling to shove through its new CriminalJustice Bill.

The held view is that trial by jury is the cornerstone of Britishdemocracy and if you take it away the whole building will comecrashing down.

But actually, when push comes to shove, you don’t give a stuffabout democracy. If it means getting a few more burglars off thestreet, damn fairness and decency.

What you want is a system that works. In the wee small hours youcan admit that previous convictions should be made known to thecourt before the case is tried.

You also know that the jury system is a farce.

How can you let a woman who thinks she has insects in her headdecide whether it’s legal to move a pension fund through theCayman Islands? In certain parts of Somerset I suspect thatimbecile and embezzle sound exactly the same.

And it’s not just fraud either. Back in the olden days when a manwas accused of stealing a goat you listened to people who’d seenhim do it and made up your mind.

But now you have to have a basic grasp of forensic science.

I can see why Labour MPs are so concerned. They must see manyidiots in their surgeries. But the ones who go to a surgery are thegleaming white tip of the iceberg. I’m talking about the sort of peoplewho have no clue what an MP is or what he does; people who youthought existed only in a Viz cartoon.

The Tories should be concerned, too, though. I know one uprightshires lady who sat on a jury and said afterwards: ‘Well, I could tellthe little devil was guilty. You could tell the moment he walked intothe court.’

A jury is supposed to be made up of your peers, and peers meanssomeone who is equal in standing or rank. Well, I’m sorry, but onthat basis the man with the allegedly stolen car on television theother night could only be trusted to try plants.

Terrifyingly, my equal, in terms of someone who writes about carsand occasionally appears on television, is Stephen Bayley. And Iwouldn’t want to be tried by him either.

At the moment a jury trial has nothing to do with democracy andeverything to do with sheer blind luck. But what do we replace itwith?

The judge? Ooh, no. Professional jurors? What sort of person’sgoing to sign up for that? It wouldn’t even work, I fear, if we testedthe heads of those called.

Because all the bright, intelligent people would pretend to be stupidso they could go home.

I think you may be worried where this is going to end. There’s talk atthe moment of allowing television cameras into the courts. So howlong will it be before the viewers at home are asked to ‘press the

red button now’ and vote? You read it here first.

Sunday 30 November 2003

They’re Trying to Frame Kristen ScottDonkeyI’ve had a horribly busy week and quite the last thing I needed wasa directive from the European Parliament that I must get passportsfor my three donkeys.

I tried to argue that I have no plans to take them abroad, or evenout of their paddock, but it was no good. Council Directive90/426/EEC says that anyone with any horse, mule or donkey mustget a passport. At twenty quid a go.

This was going to be a pain in the backside. Geoff, my grey donkey,is so stubborn that he won’t even go into his stable, so how in thename of all that’s holy was I supposed to get him into one of thosephoto booths?

I suppose Eddie, who’s a playful soul, might have been up for it butthen he’d have pulled a silly face every time the flash went off. Andlet’s not forget the beautiful Kristen Scott Donkey who, when thepictures were delivered, would have stood there in tears saying‘they make my nose look too long’.

It turned out that the European Union had thought about this anddecided that instead of photographs a simple silhouette drawingwould suffice. This makes life easier but I am a trifle worried thatsilhouettes aren’t a terribly good means of identification.

First of all, if I attempted to draw the outline of a donkey, it wouldend up looking like a dog. Everything I draw looks like a dog.

My vet says this is no problem so long as I get the markings in theright place.

‘But what if my donkey has no markings?’ I asked. ‘Quite,’ he said.Small wonder that Princess Anne called the whole scheme a‘nonsense’.

So what, you might be wondering, is happening here? Why has theEU decided that all equine or asinine species, except those whichlive in the New Forest or on Dartmoor, must have a photo ID?

Well, and I promise you’re not going to believe this, the idea is thateach passport will carry details of the animal’s medical history. Thisway you’ll know at a glance if it has been fed harmful drugs, shouldyou decide to eat it.

Oh good. So, if one day I suddenly come over all peckish anddecide that Geoff’s front leg would go well with the veg and gravy, I’llbe able to make sure that his previous owner did not feed him adrug that would make me grow two heads.

I think it’s worth pausing here for a moment. You see, over the yearsI have eaten a puffin, a snake, a whale (well, a bit of one), a dog, acrocodile and an anchovy. But I would sooner eat a German thantuck into my donkeys. And I don’t think I’m alone on this one either.

For sure, there are problems when a horse dies. You are no longerallowed to bury it in your garden, so you must rely on the local huntto come and take it away.

But what happens when hunting is banned?

Is the EU saying that we have to break out the carving knife andwarm up the sauce?

I don’t think so. In Britain we have a line in the sand when it comesto what we will and what we will not put in our mouths. We will eat

rats, so long as they’re called ‘chicken madras’. But we will not eathorses.

Unfortunately, however, the line in the sands of Europe is a littlefurther away.

And consequently those buggers will eat anything.

In France you often find horse on the menu and in Germany, as wediscovered last week, it’s not against the law to eat your dinnerguests. Furthermore, I know they make salami out of the fewdonkeys in Spain that have not been hurled to their deaths from thenearest tower block.

Over there across the water there is perhaps some argument forequine passports.

Being able to tell if the horse had been on ‘horse’ at some point inits life would be reassuring. You need to know if the pony’s beensmacked before it’s smoked.

But do you believe for one minute that the farmers of Andalusia areactually going to act on the EU directive? Or do you think the letterwill simply be fed to the mule?

That was my first reaction, I must admit. I thought it was a stupidjoke and if I did nothing it would go away. But no. It turns out that inBritain, the only country in Europe where we don’t eat Mr Ed orEeyore, local authorities will be employing ass monitors to scour thecountryside for unregistered donkeys and horses. And owners willbe fined for non-compliance.

Again. Can you see that happening in Europe? I can’t. I’ve seenthose massive aquatic vacuum cleaners that Spain calls a fishingfleet pulling into the port of La Coruña and unloading fish about 2mm long. And there wasn’t an EU inspector within a million miles.

mm long. And there wasn’t an EU inspector within a million miles.

I can’t even see it working in Germany. The Germans love a rulemore than anyone, but when they tried to introduce a similarscheme a few years ago only 50 per cent of the nation’s horseswere registered. And all the inspectors who were sent out to checkon the others mysteriously never came back.


All I Want for Christmas is a Ban on OfficePartiesIt is traditional at this time of year for newspaper columnists to sayhow much they despise just about everything to do with Christmas.Sadly, this is not an option for me.

Naturally there are one or two minor irritations. I don’t, for instance,like it when someone throws a model aeroplane in your face themoment you walk through the door of Hamleys. And my wife and Ihave an uncanny knack of buying one another the same thingevery year. It’s why we have two video cameras and two dogs.

But mostly I get on well with Christmas. My fairy lights work straightout of the box. My tree does not drop needles.I don’t eat or drinktoo much. I like getting long letters in cards from people I haven’tseen all year. I enjoy the enforced bonhomie of New Year’s Eve.

I find it satisfying to wrap presents. I like turkey curry in February.The Great Escape is always worth watching. I don’t have anyrelatives who wet themselves over lunch. I love seeing the children’sbeaming faces at 5 a.m. I see nothing wrong with Christmasjumpers. I am grateful for my new socks.

I adore Boxing Day drinks parties. I think school nativity plays arefunny. I don’t get stuck in traffic jams leaving London. I don’t get in apanic about last-minute shopping and I don’t find it even remotelystressful to be with the family for a few days.

That said, there is one feature of Christmas that fills me with suchfear and such dread that I genuinely shiver whenever it ismentioned. It is the damp log in the fire, the mould on the smokedsalmon, the advertisement in the Queen’s speech. It is… the WorksDo.

Do.

When I was a schoolboy my mum and dad had a toy factory and,starting in January every year, the staff would each save 10p aweek for the annual yuletide knees-up.

By July they would have enough for the prawn cocktail and bySeptember they were dizzy with anticipation about the first glass ofBaileys. I never understood why.

I still don’t. The notion that you turn off your computer at 6 p.m. andat 6.01 p.m. are making merry with people you don’t like very muchover a beaker of Pomagne seems odd.

They are not your friends or you would have seen them socially atsome point during the year. So why think for a moment that theevening will be anything other than hell?

Christmas in Britain these days is almost completely ruined by theoffice party.

The streets become full of ordinary people who have suddenly lostthe ability to walk in a straight line. And the atmosphere in everyrestaurant is firebombed by the table of 60 who order food not forits taste but its aerodynamic efficiency.

What’s more, for the past week it has been impossible to getanyone on the telephone because they’re either choosing an outfitor finding a restaurant to ruin or having their hair done ready for theBig Day.

I swear some people put more effort into the office party than theydo into the family event a few days later. Last year the Top GearChristmas knees-up was organised, as is the way with these things,by someone who is nineteen.

So I ended up in a throbbing basement, looking at my watch everyfew minutes and thinking: can I really go at 10 p.m.? This year I’mnot going at all.

So that’s the first thing. Never, ever let the firm’s outing beorganised by the most junior member of the team because theiridea of a good night out – lots of vomit and silly hats – is likely to befar removed from yours.

You think you have nothing to talk about with the man who drivesthe forklift in the warehouse, but you have even less in common withthe office juniors.

Your house plants, for instance, are alive – but you can’t smoke anyof them.

There is more food in your fridge than booze. You hear yourfavourite songs when you’re in the lift and, while you still like to seethe dawn, you prefer to have had a night’s kip beforehand.

There is another problem. Wherever the office juniors are, all theytalk about is where they’re going next. Wherever you are, all youwant to do is go to bed. And they say, the day afterwards, ‘I’m nevergoing to drink that much again.’ You say, ‘I just can’t seem to drinkas much as I used to.’

The second thing about the works party is sex. A survey this weekrevealed that 45 per cent of people have had it away at theChristmas do. Why? You sit opposite the plump girl for 48 weeksand it never once occurs to you that she is interesting. So howcome, after one warm wine, she only needs to put on a paper hat tobecome Jordan?

Even this year’s Sunday Times party is likely to be a nightmare, but

for a rather unusual reason. You see, the BBC recently said that itsstaff were to stop writing columns for newspapers. Andrew Marr,John Simpson and our very own John Humphrys are affected.

Me, though? The BBC is not bothered. My opinion, it seems, isirrelevant and worthless. And I’m sure that Humphrys will be dutybound to bring that up.


* These allegations later proved to be completely unfounded, andno charges were ever brought.

the world according to clarkson

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